PSC Consulting Services

Several types of consulting support are provided by PSC: general consulting support; scientific consulting support; and scientific visualization support.

General consulting

Whether your project at PSC utilizes your own code or a third-party package, your first line of support is PSC's experienced team of user consultants. They will help you solve problems relating to the computing environment at PSC, to hardware and software considerations on each supercomputer you use, and to porting and optimizing your code on PSC supercomputers.

Critical problems

Staff consultants at the PSC are available during normal business hours. At other times, student consultants will handle your questions and, if necessary, refer them to a staff consultant for further investigation. Our phones are staffed Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (EST).

For time-critical problems, you can reach our User Services department at 412-268-6350 or 800-221-1641.

When you need assistance, be prepared to supply us with the name of the machine you were using, the date and time that the problem occurred, and the location of any relevant job or output files.

Less critical problems

For less time-critical problems, send email to remarks@psc.edu. Remarks mail is usually answered within one business day.

Before you send email to remarks, make sure your PSC email is being delivered to your desired location.

Scientific Consulting Support

Scientific High Performance Computing Specialists

Certain problems require a consultant with detailed expertise in your scientific or engineering discipline, and with a developer's as well as a practitioner's knowledge of the inner workings of a community or commercial software package. Our user consultants are trained to recognize such problems, and will steer you to the appropriate Scientific HPC Specialist. These Ph.D. and M.Sc. level experts constitute your second line of support at PSC.

Scalable Parallel Code Development

If you would like to optimize your code so that it runs efficiently on at least 1000 processors of BigBen, PSC's Scaling Advantage Program (SAP) is available to help you. This program includes consulting by PSC experts, special queue handling if necessary, and service unit discounts, under a jointly developed collaborative work plan.

If the scope of your application development and optimization effort includes TeraGrid resources beyond those operated by PSC, our experts can help you via the Advanced Support for TeraGrid Applications (ASTA) program.

Please contact remarks@psc.edu if you are interested in SAP or ASTA.