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Tales from the trenches: can user support tools make a difference?

Published: 15 November 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Those participating in HUST '15 appreciate the potential value of high quality tools and technologies intended to enhance the user experience on large-scale computers. Given the changing landscape of large-scale computing, they likely also feel a renewed sense of urgency associated with the emerging needs of an increasingly diverse user base. Do user support tools, however, really make a difference for users and those who support them? Are they making a difference now? This paper is one response to these questions: it describes five brief case studies in which the authors employed software tools to help address problems and issues associated with users' needs on the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The paper highlights the authors' thoughts on their experiences, including a few deliberately provocative assertions intended to invite reflection and discussion.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HUST '15: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools
November 2015
57 pages
ISBN:9781450340007
DOI:10.1145/2834996
  • General Chair:
  • Chris Bording,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Todd Gamblin,
  • Vera Hansper
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 15 November 2015

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  • National Science Foundation

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SC15
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HUST '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 5 of 9 submissions, 56%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 5 of 9 submissions, 56%

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  • (2017)TestpilotProceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools10.1145/3152493.3152555(1-10)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2017
  • (2016)Sanity toolProceedings of the Third International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools10.5555/3018834.3018838(24-30)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2016
  • (2016)Library Function Tracking with XALTProceedings of the XSEDE16 Conference on Diversity, Big Data, and Science at Scale10.1145/2949550.2949558(1-7)Online publication date: 17-Jul-2016
  • (2016)Data Curation with a Focus on ReuseProceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE-CS on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1145/2910896.2910906(45-54)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2016
  • (2016)Sanity Tool: Lightweight Diagnostics for Individual User Accounts on Supercomputer Systems2016 Third International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools (HUST)10.1109/HUST.2016.008(24-30)Online publication date: Nov-2016

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