MyNERSC Gives Users Easier Access to Data, Jobs, Wait Times

MyNERSC, a web-based portal that provides NERSC users with real-time information on their jobs, disk usage, allocations and queue wait times, is garnering rave reviews following recent upgrades that have broadened its functionality and streamlined its ease of use.

"The new interface at https://my.nersc.gov/ is AWESOME!” said one NERSC user following the recent NERSC Users Group meeting, where attendees were introduced to the new features. “It's the best I have ever seen. Really user friendly, and really useful to have a quick overview of the project status."

Screen shot of the "Now Computing" page in MyNERSC.

MyNERSC was originally developed 10 years ago, and in  2014 both the web and mobile versions were revamped to bring a vastly improved user experience and a wealth of new interactive content to the web, according to Jack Deslippe, a member of NERSC’s User Services Group who specializes in material science applications and has been instrumental in the development and deployment of MyNERSC.

“The new version of MyNERSC is designed to be a one-stop destination for interactive user content on the web,” Deslippe said. “It seamlessly transforms for mobile or desktop use and combines interactive content that used to be spread across MyNERSC, NIM (NERSC’s accounting interface), Service Now (NERSC’s ticketing system), Mobile NERSC and nersc.gov.”

The goal is to make MyNERSC the single source for interactive/real-time information of interest to NERSC’s users, combining tools that were spread across a number of different services such as NIM, Service Now,Mobile NERSC and the main NERSC web site, he added.

The development of MyNERSC is in some ways a response to changes in the way people compute, Deslippe noted.

Jack Deslippe

“These days, folks spend as much (or more) time with their smart phones and tablets as they do with their computers,” he said. “And when they use their computer, they are spending more time in the web browsers and using rich web applications than in traditional desktop applications. The rising popularity of Chrome-OS and Firefox-OS and other HTML5 based operating systems is evidence of this. New users expect to interact with an HPC system in this same way.”

New enhancements include an individualized dashboard for all users, containing repo and disk usage information, job and system status, completed job information and global chat. There is also an advanced queue-time predictor based on historical data, which for the first time can exclude time jobs spend on hold, allowing users to optimize their job scripts to minimize queue latency. In addition, users can now monitor the backlog of NERSC systems over time and track their (and other) repos’ usage over time for multiple years. They can also monitor file system and compute benchmark performance at NERSC using the same data NERSC uses to monitor performance on its HPC systems over time. In addition, MyNERSC enables users to see a rich amount of detail regarding queued, running and completed jobs. This includes tracking the rank in the queue over time and a variety of performance data from Darshan, ALTD, Cray Proc Stats and LMT about completed jobs.

The latest version of MyNERSC also allows users to:
• Plot the rank of their job over time in the queue
• Hold, release and delete their jobs
• Download any of their files and upload new files, including to and from HPSS
• Monitor the NERSC file system performance over time
• Subscribe to the NERSC outages via Google Calendar
• Create and manage their Service Now support tickets
• View a history of all NERSC outages and announcements
• Change their default repo, default shell and other NIM profile information
• See a list of top jobs running at the center and node breakdown by DOE office, science category and class
• Choose an interactive login node to use based on utilization and/or free memory

“NERSC has learned a lot about creating compelling web applications over the past decade, starting with our science gateway initiatives,” Deslippe said. “Through the use of modern web technology such as HTML5, advanced javascript libraries and WebGL, NERSC has created very rich web applications for individual domain groups. The re-invented MyNERSC is our attempt to bring this knowledge and modern web tools to a gateway for all NERSC users.”