Support

Consulting
NSERC and the University of Manitoba jointly fund a position to help researchers to utilize the HPC facilities to their best advantage. A set of guidelines to the support that may be provided by the HPC Consultant is available here. Also, researchers interested in exploring HPC technologies are encouraged to contact the consultant:

Jonatan Aronsson
Office: E2-586 EITC Building, Fort Garry Campus
Email: aronsson@cc.umanitoba.ca
Phone: (204) 474-6912

WestGrid
WestGrid has a team of technical analysts available to assist researchers with using the WestGrid resources. The analysts provide a wide range of services to researchers, for example:

• Assist researchers with getting started with HPC
• Provision of training courses and seminars
• Assistance with code development, debugging, optimization, porting and parallelization
• Assistance with code performance analysis
• Assistance with scientific visualization
• Data management advice

There is a single email address, support@westgrid.ca, which is read by all analysts at all the WestGrid sites. Use this address for questions/assistance related to any of the WestGrid facilities. University of Manitoba researchers and graduate students can also contact their local HPC consultant directly for consultation and help.

Other Resources
There are a number of other resources that you can also use to get help with HPC and/or WestGrid:

• WestGrid Website
  The WestGrid web site (http://www.westgrid.ca) contains detailed information about how-to run jobs, compile codes, policies, etc specific to the WestGrid systems.
• Training Seminars
  During the fall and winter, WestGrid offers a series of seminars through video conferencing and, in some cases, by web streaming. Past topics have included an overview of WestGrid facilities, introduction to UNIX, serial and parallel (OpenMP and MPI) programming, submitting jobs and data visualization. See the WestGrid training page for the schedule and list of topics in the next seminar series.
• Online Training
  There are numerous online tutorials on topics such as basic UNIX commands, shell scripting and parallel programming. Some of these are referenced on the WestGrid web pages or you can contact the support staff for recommendations on material covering specific topics.