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

Contact support@nris.no for all other support requests:

NOTE: Use this e-mail if you need to extend your job’s walltime.

  • technical issues

  • software installation requests

  • questions about job scripts

  • technical questions about storage and compute

  • technical questions about the services and toolkits

Behind these addresses are issue trackers (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).

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:

  • 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, 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 heavility used programs and domains.