NUG Task Forces and Working Groups

User Requirements

NUGEX will appoint from among its ranks a task force contributing to the development and writing of NERSC’s user requirements based on their scientific research area. The creation of this document will be led by NERSC and reviewed by NUGEX, NERSC management, and DOE program managers bi-annually. It will detail the hardware, software, infrastructure, and training needs of the NERSC User community including but not limited to requirements for uptime, job turn around time, and file system latency. The chair and one representative from each Office of Science from NUGEX will participate in advisory committees when they are convened. The NUGEX chair will be integrated into the SOW creation process to assure concordance between user requirements and planned system purchase. NUGEX will have access to pre-production systems, and recommend representative software from across the Office of Sciences for testing. The aim of this subcommittee is to help NERSC and the DOE Office of Science in the planning process for the NERSC facility.

User Experience

NUGEX will appoint from among its members a working group to collect and report on current user experience.  The goal of this working group is to develop actionable recommendations in a 6-12 month time frame, distinguishing it from the long-term planning done in the user requirements working group. This group will be focused on improvements to system monitoring, system performance, and other challenges as well as share user success stories.  NUGEX will be granted early access to test changes to the software environment to ensure contiguity of user experience. In collaboration with NERSC this group will analyze trends in support tickets and the user survey, perform retrospectives after major changes, and analyze gaps between NERSC offerings and user needs. The leader of this working group will attend NERSC queue committee meetings or nominate an alternate.  This group will report recommendations within its membership, to NERSC, to the Computing Sciences Advisory Board, and the appropriate DOE program managers.

User Education and Engagement

NUGEX will appoint from among its members a working group responsible for user education and engagement that works closely with internal NERSC staff to cultivate and expand an engaged user community. The working group is responsible for helping plan and host NUG meetings as well as helping plan other training events, including any NUG conference calls. In person NUG meetings will be held at a minimum of once a year. It will make recommendations on venue and establish, in cooperation with NERSC, the program for the NUG meetings. This working group is responsible for communicating user needs with respect to training events, including making sure length, frequency, and level of detail of training is appropriate. Finally, it will make recommendations to lowering the barrier of entry to utilizing new functionality at NERSC.