Academic User Support

Academic User support is a core ICHEC activity and is invaluable to scientific research in Ireland, enabling computationally intensive scientific and engineering research.

Our support staff liaise with the research and scientific community, providing robust support to users and access to computational resources. 

The Academic User Support activity engages in a wide range of activities that support the research community. These activities include:

• Computational Resources: ICHEC facilitates access to our HPC systems enabling researchers to carry out code testing, molecular simulations, virtual screening, data mining, environmental and forecast predictions and machine learning implementations. ICHEC offers different access schemes, including the National HPC Service, for researchers based in Ireland. 
• Code development: Computational Scientists at ICHEC have been deeply involved in code development particularly in parallelisation and benchmarking custom codes. We actively engage with users and researchers to offer advice and solutions about how to increase the performance of their codes towards better performance and scalability, therefore enabling them to tackle larger scientific problems.
• Software installation: Our Computational Scientists and the systems team help with the installations of both licensed and open source software packages, followed by maintenance and upgrades to the latest version of the programs available.
• Helpdesk and user support: This is one of ICHEC's main support activities. Our Computational Scientists and Systems Administrators work together to solve issues raised by users including code installation, bugs, scheduling problems, National Service applications, etc.
• Scientific and technical expertise: ICHEC members have been supporting user's research both from the scientific and technical side leading to fruitful collaborations and publications. Some examples of current collaborations involving ICHEC members can be found here.
• Training and education: Another pillar of our academic services include training and education activities led by Dr. Simon Wong. We provide a range of training courses as well as ECTS-accredited graduate modules in technical computing and HPC.
• Application support: ICHEC staff have supported and assessed Ireland based researchers in their applications under different calls including SFI, EuroHPC, URF, etc.
• External resources: ICHEC is the Irish national contact point for EuroHPC, helping applicants prepare and benchmark their codes toward successful applications for compute resources on some of the largest supercomputers in Europe.