Service Levels

NERSC Supported Services Model

NERSC supports various services at various levels of support. This document outlines the different levels of support that can be expected for a given service.

Production Services

For all production services at NERSC

• Monitoring is performed by NERSC Operations using automated tools (Nagios).
• Outages are announced on the MOTD and must follow the rules defined in System Outages document.
• User facing documentation is available on NERSC website.
• On-call procedures are defined by NERSC Operations -- a NERSC staff member is contacted when there are issues with the service.
• Support is at one of the following service levels: 24x7, 16x5 or 8x5 (further defined below)

For issues with any production service users can contact NERSC in one of the following ways:

Business Hours:
Online ticket system: http://help.nersc.gov
Email: consult@nersc.gov or accounts@nersc.gov

Off Hours (for urgent system issues):
Phone: 1-800-66-NERSC, option 1 (USA only) or 510-486-6821

24x7 Service Level

• Critical Services that affect entire NERSC Center
• The availability of entire computational systems (e.g., Perlmutter)
• NERSC staff directly notified of failures 24x7

16x5 Service Level

• Medium to high priority services – may affect specific projects or services but not all of NERSC
• NERSC staff directly notified of failures between 7am-11pm, Monday through Friday
• Email notification for failures during night hours/weekends; ticket opened and assigned to service point of contact; follow up next business day

8x5 Service Level

• Low to Medium priority - may affect specific projects or services but not all of NERSC
• NERSC staff directly notified of failures between 8am-5pm Monday-Friday
• Email notification for failures during night hours/weekends; ticket opened and assigned to service point of contact; follow up next business day

Service Table

Experimental Services

NERSC also supports a set of services that are considered experimental in nature. These services may be under active development or test and are not considered stable enough to be in production. If you wish to use an experimental service please send in a ticket or contact the NERSC staff member responsible for the service (see below).

Experimental Services are defined by the following characteristics:

• Low priority services - typically this is for services that are still in development.
• No guaranteed level of support - services may be taken down for maintenance on short notice.
• No operations monitoring - Users should directly contact the person responsible for the service directly if there are issues.

Services in the experimental tier do not have an explicit SLA.

Experimental Service Table