User survey

In June 2020, a user survey was conducted at all HPC.NRW sites with a total of about 460 participants. This survey aimed to investigate the users‘ need for HPC support, software, and training in NRW. Thus, the user survey covered not only numerous aspects of work package 2, but also addressed open questions from the other work packages in the HPC.NRW project. The evaluation of the user survey provided us with valuable insights on a variety of issues associated with HPC: For example, depending on location, between 15% and 50% of the respondents would like to have the use of Jupyter notebooks on cluster systems, and about 66% of the respondents have not yet attended HPC courses or tutorials, despite there being a high demand. Furthermore, about 70% of the respondents indicated that they had a publication in preparation or in the review process at the time of the survey. A detailed analysis of this user survey can be found below. All sites also completed site-specific evaluations and extracted valuable information to help improve their own HPC-services. Overall, the user survey provided important insights to improve support, the software environment, training, and other aspects. It is planned to revise this survey and repeat it regularly in order to assess the effectiveness of the measures taken as well as to take changing requirements and wishes into account.