Project mentoring

As a key feature of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) support concept, a mentor is assigned to each scientific project, that is currently being conducted on the supercomputers at JSC to act as an additional point of contact. Typically, the mentor is an experienced scientist in the respective research area and offers the following support capabilities towards the project:

• The mentor acts as a permanent point of contact between the project and JSC, which allows to have a more in-depth understanding of the project, its history, resource consumption, as well as its associated challenges.
• The mentor supports the project in context of long-term support activities and questions for an optimal project execution.
• The mentor is available for requests concerning further support and training offers by JSC or helps to arrange in-depth code analyses and activities, for example in context of computational performance, I/O optimization, long-term data management or visualization.
• The mentor can coordinate the usage of dedicated resources (e.g. reservation of resources or job scheduling during BigWeeks).
• The mentor also monitors the project regarding resource consumption and system level performance metrics and will contact the project if necessary. In addition, the mentor will report the results to JSC management on regular basis.

The project mentoring is a complementary service while the JSC support team and the User Administration are still the points of contact for first-level issues or service requests concerning the HPC systems at JSC.

Through the mentoring program we intend to offer an efficient but also personalized support structure for a project and at the same time ensure the most efficient use of resources at the three GCS centers.

The individual mentor of each project can be found within the project overview in JUDOOR.