The whole HPC team is involved in users' support since this is one of the most critical services. There are several ways to get support as described below. Part of the team stands on the first line and answer most tickets. The rest of the team stands on the second line to perform actions requiring cluster changes, tuning or analytics.
Answers are generally provided during office hours, but we don't hesitate to do some extra!
There is already some documentation either on this HPC web site, on the VSC web site or on the CECI web site. You are strongly invited to consult those sources of documentation and spend a bit of time reading it.
With the team being reinforced, we'll be able to continuously extend and improve our documentation. If you want specific additional information, please let us know.
If you cannot find a solution from the documentation, you can contact us by email. The official email addresses are hpc@vub.ac.be and hpc@ulb.ac.be which redirects your messages to our HPC support queue on the VUB ServiceNow system. When contacting us, please provide sufficient information like:
We are not keen to provide our phone numbers for a simple reason: our days are already extremely busy and we are not always sitting at our desk. Trying to call us will be frustrating since you might not reach us all the time and conversations might be cut down to a minimum if other urgent matters are taking place.
But we can call you if extra information is required to solve an issue.
For some complex problems or requests, we can either organise a meeting with you, or you can ask for one, to discuss all the ins and outs to find a solution.
Like for the phone, please don't pop in our offices, we might not be there, or it might not be the right time and we could, nicely, cut short the conversation.
Beyond those traditional support models, we will work on more modern solutions. Stay tuned!