Expanse Help

SDSC Expanse offers several ways to get help, ranging from an email consulting desk to documentation and training. Emailing the SDSC consulting desk is the fastest option for anything specific to the machine — job failures, software, performance, or storage.

Consulting desk

SDSC’s primary support channel for Expanse is its consulting desk, consult@sdsc.edu. Use it for job failures, module and software problems, performance tuning, storage questions, and requests to run unusually large batches.

Include these details so the first reply can actually solve your problem rather than ask for more information:

• your username, and the job ID and partition if a job is involved
• the full submit script, not a paraphrase of it
• the exact error text, copied rather than summarized
• what you have already tried, and when it last worked

ACCESS help desk

Expanse is allocated through ACCESS, so anything about your account rather than the machine goes to ACCESS instead: ACCESS IDs, passwords, allocation requests, and being added to a project.

• ACCESS help ticket — sign in with your ACCESS ID and choose the category that fits
• See ACCESS Help for the other ACCESS support channels, including the Ask.CI community forum and MATCH mentoring

System status

Before reporting a problem, check whether the system is in maintenance or degraded: SDSC Data Center Status.

Training

• SDSC training programs and the HPC training portal — live sessions and self-paced material
• Expanse 101 — the introductory course for new Expanse users

Documentation

• Expanse User Guide — the authoritative reference for partitions, filesystems, and job submission
• Expanse system architecture — node types, memory, and interconnect
• SDSC Expanse on ACCESS — the resource description in the ACCESS documentation
• Worked example scripts are installed on the system itself, under /cm/shared/examples/sdsc/