Getting help

We very much appreciate that you check our status system before contacting us about problems with the infrastructure. You can learn more about this system on the page Status and maintenance of systems.

Administrative support

Contact contact@sigma2.no for support requests concerning:

NOTE: Use this e-mail if you need to add / delete users to a group or change allocation details such as quotas.

  • resource applications

  • projects

  • compute and storage allocations

  • user accounts

  • group memberships

Technical support

Use our support form to get support regarding topics like:

  • technical issues

  • questions about job scripts

  • technical questions about storage and compute

  • technical questions about the services and toolkits

  • extension of walltime of Slurm jobs

In case you want us to install software and applications globally, please use this software request form instead.

NOTE: We are currently testing the above mentioned forms to guide you through the process of creating a support request. In case you have any issues with the forms, please send instead an email to: support@nris.no

Behind these addresses is our issue tracker (ticket system) and you will get an automatic reply first and can expect response from our staff within hours during normal work-hours, or at the latest the following working day (except holidays). Use one of these addresses; do not send email directly to staff members.

When replying to email from the support line please do not change the email subject.

However, for a new problem, do not reply to emails with unrelated subjects (and ticket numbers) as this can be confusing for us.

This information will help us to answer faster

We get many requests for help which are too vague to give a useful response. So, when sending us a question, please answer these questions and you’ll get the fastest useful response:

  • What is your username?

  • Which system are you on? (NIRD, Saga, Fram, Betzy, external machine, …)

  • Which project are you using?

  • If it is a problem with a job: Jobid

  • 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, and what were the results? (Be specific enough to be reproducible - copy and paste exact commands you run, scripts, inputs, output messages, etc.)

If you don’t know something, it’s OK, just do your best and we’ll help from there! You can also chat with us to brainstorm about issues in general.

This summary is copied and adapted from the Aalto Science-IT help pages. Please also look at the page for a more detailed guide on Writing good support requests.

What can you expect from the support line

You can expect efficiency and a friendly and competent staff with decades of combined experience on supercomputers.

However, the load on the support staff can sometimes be significant and we may need to prioritize issues. In busy times we may not be able to help you with questions that would be better addressed to your local IT departments.

Domain-specific questions may be beyond our expertise. However, we maintain a few application liaisons for very commonly used programs and domains.