User Consulting

The High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) staff provides assistance (Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm) with regards to, among other things: debugging, code optimization and parallelization, and batch processing.

Your email queries to help@hprc.tamu.edu should include, when possible, the following items:

  • Informative e-mail (subject) headers.
  • The name of the machine you are working on.
  • Relevant error messages.
  • Location of relevant files: job files, error files, etc.*
  • Which program/package you were running.
  • Clear description of the problem.

* As a courtesy to the HPRC staff, please do not send us large files (larger than 100 KB) as email attachments.

PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR UIN IN ANY EMAIL TO US. We often want your NetID for login identification on our systems, but we don't want your UIN (we don't use them). Please keep your UIN to yourself.

The usefulness, accuracy, and promptness of the information we provide to answer a question depends, to a good extent, on whether you have given us useful and relevant information.

Before you send a query to the Help Desk, check the News, Events, and the Messages of the Day for news that may answer your query or be related to your query.

If you would like to come to the helpdesk for assistance, please see our contact page for our location.

Advanced Support Program

High Performance Research Computing has recognized the need for providing technical assistance to research teams across campus that goes beyond "general consulting". As a result, HPRC, to the extent that staffing levels permit, now offers collaborations in research projects with a large computational component. Under the ASP, one or more HPRC analysts will contribute expertise and experience in several areas of high performance computing in a sustained and focused way. Our contributions in collaborative work can include any of the following:

  • Porting applications to our clusters
  • Optimizing and analyzing serial code performance
  • Developing parallel code from serial versions and analyzing performance
  • Optimizing serial and parallel I/O code performance
  • Assisting in the optimal use of mathematical libraries
  • Assisting with code development and design
  • Assisting with the improvement of workflow automation in scientific processes

If you are interested in a collaboration through our ASP program, please send us e-mail at, help@hprc.tamu.edu.

As part of the Advanced Support Program, HPRC offers a series of Bring-Your-Own sessions that provides one-on-one consulting:

Bring-Your-Own-Code (BYOC)
Description: BYOC sessions are meant to help researchers overcome general Python programming hurdles in their research projects. Get consulting for a python project, help with python programming basics, data visualization, manipulation, and web scraping. Researchers will work one-on-one with our research-scientists regarding their own ongoing or future research. To best utilize the session, researchers should come prepared with their research project notes and have a clear sense of deliverables.
HPRC Research Specialist: Dr. Zhenhua He and Richard Lawrence, HPRC
Dates: Wednesday's 3:00-4:30pm CT, Spring 2022. Please visit the registration page for a complete listing of dates.
Location: In-person (Blocker 218A and 217B) or via Zoom
Registration

Bring-Your-Own-Molecule (BYOM)
Description: BYOM sessions are open to researchers engaged in or thinking about research using molecular modeling methods. Researchers will work one-on-one with our research-scientists on projects that employ quantum mechanical methods, molecular mechanics/dynamics simulations, and AI/ML tools to study molecular properties. These sessions are meant to help researchers overcome specific technical hurdles in their molecular modeling projects.
HPRC Research Specialist:
Dates: Please visit the registration page for a complete listing of dates.
Location: In person or via Zoom
Registration

Bring-Your-Own-Genome (BYOG)
Description: BYOG sessions are open to researchers engaged in or thinking about research in genomics. Researchers will work one-on-one with our research-scientists on projects that employ genomics. Get consulting for a project, help with computational problems, or scripting solutions for parsing and manipulating large genomic datasets.
HPRC Research Specialist: Dr. Wesley Brashear, HPRC
Dates: Please visit the registration page for a complete listing of dates.
Location: In-person (Blocker 218A) or via Zoom
Registration

ASP is supported in part by NSF award #1925764, CC* Team: SWEETER -- SouthWest Expertise in Expanding, Training, Education and Research and NSF award #2112356, ACSS: ACES - Accelerating Computing for Emerging Sciences.