Blog

By David Vicente (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

 

If you are a EuroHPC user or planning to become one, it is worth taking a moment to see how projects are supported through the EPICURE program. In this blog, I will walk you through the typical process we follow to help users get the most out of EuroHPC resources quickly and efficiently.

 

 

While the general approach is similar across EPICURE teams in Europe, we will use our in-house structure at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) as a concrete example to illustrate how this support looks in practice.

 

Step 1: Receiving Your Request

 

Everything begins when a user submits a support request through the EPICURE Project Management Portal: https://pm.epicure-hpc.eu/support/request/

 

After reviewing and accepting the request, we assign part of the EPICURE support team at BSC to the project. This dedicated team manages all communication and technical work with the project’s principal investigator (PI) and their team.

 

 

Step 2: The First Meeting

Usually, within a few days, we schedule an initial meeting of around 20 to 30 minutes. The main goal of this meeting is to understand the challenges or optimisation goals of the project and to discuss priorities from the user’s perspective.

 

During this meeting, we often ask the team to provide a dataset for testing or profiling, the code itself, and, if the project is focused on optimisation, a way to check the output to make sure that possible improvements do not affect correctness.

 

 

Step 3: Starting the Work

 

After gathering the necessary information, our team begins the requested technical work or optimisation tasks. We keep the user updated throughout the process, using email or short technical meetings, depending on the complexity and progress.

 

Step 4: Levels of Support

 

Projects can vary widely in duration and scope. Some projects last around one to two months, focusing on what we call second-level support, such as installing applications, fine-tuning compilation options, choosing the best libraries, or configuring the optimal environment for the chosen machine.

 

Other projects can take up to six months and involve deeper, third-level support, including code modifications, GPU porting, improving scalability, parallelisation, or complete code refactoring.

 

Regardless of the level of support, our main goal is to help users make the best use of EuroHPC resources.

 

Step 5: Closing the Project

 

When the project work is finished, we prepare and deliver a final report summarising what was done and the achieved results. We also ask users to fill out a short feedback form to help us continue improving the EPICURE support service.

 

Through this process, we make advanced HPC resources more accessible and easier to use, helping research teams save time and achieve better performance on EuroHPC systems. If you are planning to use EuroHPC resources, we encourage you to reach out. We are here to help you make the most of them.