Support

For assistance with our systems, please email: ops@tchpc.tcd.ie

Please note, that ops@tchpc.tcd.ie is the only official way to request support from Research IT.

Other communications channels, e.g. directly emailing staff on their personal email address, phoning the office, calling into the office, Microsoft Teams, etc, are not official support mechanisms and may inadvertently not be responded to. To be sure you will receive support you must email ops@tchpc.tcd.ie. You will receive a ticket number to confirm your support request when you do so. If that is not done we cannot guarantee we will respond to you.

Getting help with issues on the HPC Clusters

First steps

If you have never used our systems before please read our Cluster Usage section. This section is designed to provide new users with enough information to get started using our services.

The “Search docs” box should be used to check our available documentation.

It is also good practice to search the internet for key phrases in your error messages too. That’s probably what the person answering your request is going to do.

Next Step

Please email us.

When doing so please describe your issue as precisely as you can. It is very helpful for us if you can lay out step by step what you did so we can try to reproduce it. Doing so will speed up our response time.

When contacting us please try to include as much of the following information as you can so we can as speedily as possible help you.

1. What you did and how you did it. I.e. what exact steps you took:

   1. E.g. I ran sbatch mybatchfile.sh

   2. Note: just including a copy and paste of the output from your terminal in your email would probably be enough.

2. What happened.

   1. E.g. I got this error message and the job wasn’t submitted to the queue.

3. What you had expected to happen but didn’t.

   1. E.g. I expected the job to be submitted to the queue.

4. Please include Error Messages and other meaningful output.

5. When appropriate, include the information we would need to find your artifacts and understand your workflow:

   1. If having a problem with something on a cluster, please specify which cluster. (At the time of writing we run 11 and a number of other systems, it helps to know where to start looking).

   2. The directory containing your build and/or job script.

   3. The modules you were using.

   4. Relevant job numbers.

   5. Any recent changes in your workflow that could affect or explain the behavior you’re observing.

Note on screenshots. A copy and paste of the textual output of an error is preferred over a screenshot where possible. Copy and pasting makes searching with the information easier and it is less prone to transcription problems. Inserting screenshots into emails can also sometimes disrupt the flow of reading an error report, if instead a copy and paste of the error text is used it may be easier to read.