What help is available for different levels of work
When to ask for help
How to write support requests so that you get quick and useful answers
How to create reproducible examples
The value of growing calculations and simplifying problems
This talk has borrowed some points from "How to Get Help and Ask for Software" (B.-H. Mevik)
R. Darst, E. Glerean, J. Suvilehto, R. Santos, and the CodeRefinery community for discussions and ideas
https://documentation.sigma2.no/getting_help/support_line.html
I have spent some time on both sides (research and support)
Do not hesitate to ask for help and ask if in doubt.
But the helper will appreciate if you spend more than 2 minutes on the problem before asking.
"I will work on this problem for one hour, then go to garage and ask for help".
Asking for advice
Asking to get something done for you: installation, scaling, programming
I wrote a very long email motivating why I would benefit so much from getting access to code X
hi,I guess what you meant asking in-between all those paragraphs was:"can I please get the code X?"Yes! Here it is :-)
The first thing we see is the email subject (or issue thread title)
"Problem" is not a useful subject
"Why is my job crashing?" is better
https://xkcd.com/293/, CC-BY-NC
Username (we can find it out but takes time)
Explicit paths (/cluster/home/myself/somepath
)
better than implicit paths ("it is in my home folder", ~/somepath
)
Which machine?
Which software?
Which research field?
Tell us about your environment (anything special in your .bashrc
?)
Tell us if we are allowed to look at your files (makes it faster to check certain issues)
Has it ever worked? (If so, what has changed?)
What are you trying to accomplish? Your ultimate goal, not current technical obstacle.
What did you do? Be specific enough to be reproducible - copy and paste exact commands you run, exact output messages, scripts, inputs, etc.
What do you need? Do you need a complete solution, pointers to get started, or should we say if it will take too long and we recommend you think of other solutions first?
taken from https://scicomp.aalto.fi/help/
Has it stopped working? Has it ever worked?
Does it always fail this way? Or only sometimes?
Have you tried to isolate/simplify the problem? How? (more about this later)
Please check documentation and web.
But sometimes web is "wrong" so don't hesitate to ask.
"Reverse XY problem":
thanks to R. Darst for pointing this out
Asking checklist questions can make users feel that they are annoying the help desk person.
Don't forget that the person asking may not know yet how to look for solutions before asking. Help them by showing how.
Instead of sending a URL to a documentation/solution or checklist, start with empathy, work together through checklist, show them what you have tried and what you have found.
On our side a new request opens a "ticket"
Tickets are numbered and we label them
We then try to find the person in the organization who can best help
Some tickets change hands (it might take time to understand the actual problem and some issues can take days or weeks to resolve)
Better formulated request avoids lengthy back-and-forth
Once we resolve the problem, we close the ticket
hi,I am user "johndoe" on the cluster Saga [a cluster in Norway]and since this morning I can't log in anymore.I have tried to log into Fram and Betzy [other clusters] and this works.I use ssh keys to log in and the error that I get since this morning is: $ ssh saga johndoe@saga: Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic,password,hostbased).thank you in advance for help/advice on how to solve this, John Doe
hi,I am not sure I wrote to the right support line but what I am lookingfor is a virtual machine where we can install a PHP web server with a MySQL databasebehind it.What we have in mind is to set up a service where we can share the data fromour recent study (the data can be fully public). It's about 2000 records soit's not much data. And we would like to create a web frontend where peoplecan search through and plot our data.Looking forward to hearing from you whether this is possible and what you thinkabout our approach, Jane Doe
Start with a short 5-minute run on 1 core
Then try more cores on the same node
Then try going beyond one node
Then increase the system size and make your calculation longer
Start with a short 5-minute run on 1 core
Then try more cores on the same node
Then try going beyond one node
Then increase the system size and make your calculation longer
"But a realistic system is big and takes long!"
Start then with a synthetic example
.bashrc
Making the example smaller often simplifies the problem
This process can help identifying the reason
Reduce the number of possible reasons
Shorter example is easier to debug and does not queue "forever"
Staff helping does not have prioritized queuing: we also have to wait
Run the small example
If it suddenly stopped working or runs slower, you know it's probably the machine
Now you can send us the example so that we fix the machine
Something that runs in minutes
Synthetic data is OK (it does not have to be chemically/biologically/physically meaningful)
A directory with script and all input files
All dependencies loaded in the run script
Add a README that describes how you run it and how you check whether it worked (example: "open file abc.out, there should be 'SUCCESS' at the end of file")
Ask a colleague to run that example. Are they able to copy it and run it?
Approach research software engineers near you
Pop into a "garage" or Q&A help session and say "hi!"
You are probably not alone experiencing this problem
Your question is not too simple or stupid
Many people really enjoy helping
It is also OK to write when something is working well
What help is available for different levels of work
When to ask for help
How to write support requests so that you get quick and useful answers
How to create reproducible examples
The value of growing calculations and simplifying problems
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