Support and Services

This page describes topics that Hydro has specific infrastructure to support. If you have any questions, please submit a support request.

Illinois Computes Consulting

Support services for researchers with Illinois Computes allocations include introductory guidance, code and workflow optimization, specialized domain expertise, and visualization. To access these services, the PI on the allocation should use XRAS to submit a supplement request to an Illinois Computes allocation, selecting “NCSA Consulting Services” in the list of available resources. Requesting this resource indicates a desire for support from NCSA Research Consulting on a project, to be funded by Illinois Computes. NCSA facilitators will reach out to conduct an interview to understand the project needs and develop a work plan outlining what NCSA can provide under the Illinois Computes program.

General Support

Intellectual services are available to stakeholders of Hydro on a limited basis from NFI and NCSA staff. Traditional service requests for assistance on accessing and allocation issues, porting codes, debugging, and software requests are handled through the ticket system by submitting a support request. Issues will be reviewed for estimated level of effort and scope of the request (impacts only one user, impacts an entire group, or impacts broader community).

Requests requiring deeper engagement will need additional review and potentially, funded work. Examples would be implementation of new algorithms or existing algorithms in a new language (for example, from MATLAB to Python), performance profiling, and tuning. Please submit a support request to initiate a conversation.

Machine Learning

Additional support is available for Hydro stakeholders on the topics of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). The Hydro programming environment provides access to common ML/DL frameworks through vendor provided containers from NVIDIA NGC or AMD Infinity Hub, from Anaconda Python, or from generic Python installations. If you have questions about, or need assistance with, software configurations or installations, please submit a support request.

Like General Support, requests requiring deeper engagement will need additional review and potentially, funded work. Examples would be development or implementation of new models and methodologies, optimization of distributed training, and development of large training datasets. Please submit a support request to initiate a conversation.

Geospatial

Basic support for CyberGIS or Geospatial HPC is available to Hydro stakeholders. Common software packages such as GDAL, GeoPandas, TorchGeo, and others will be available as part of the Hydro software stack. Assistance with management of common, large data sets is also available. Please submit a support request if you have questions about, or need assistance with, Geospatial workloads or datasets.