Contact & Support

OLCF User Assistance Center

The OLCF User Assistance Center is open Monday through Friday (9am-5pm EST) to support our users. Users should follow normal support procedures when reporting issues or requesting help.

When submitting a ticket to help@olcf.ornl.gov requesting help, you will likely get faster resolution by supporting a few best practices:

  • Where possible, provide helpful details that can help speed the process. For example: Project ID, relevant directories, job scripts, jobIDs, modules at compile/runtime, host name, etc.

  • When replying to a ticket, do not modify the subject line.

  • Do not piggyback unrelated questions on existing tickets. This leads to slower response times and inflates ticket history.

  • Do not open multiple tickets on the same unresolved topic. Doing so can fragment resources and slow down the time to resolution.

  • Please do not respond to previous tickets with new, unrelated issues. This can slow down response time and make finding relevant information harder thereby slowing down time to resolution.

  • Let us know if you’ve solved the issue yourself (and let us know what worked!)

  • MOST IMPORTANT: do not hesitate to contact us (help@olcf.ornl.gov); we will work through the details with you.

Authentication Support

If you are needing assistance with logging into OLCF systems, you can contact our 24/7 phone line. The phone operators will be able to help you unlock your token, reset your pin, or navigate out of next-token mode any hour of the day.

Phone: 865-241-6536

If you prefer to submit a ticket for assistance, User Assistance staff will respond to your email during business hours.

OLCF Office Hours

Would your project team like direct access to OLCF staff for current issues or questions you might have about running your application/software on OLCF resources? If so, we are offering office hours every Monday from 2-3 PM EDT and Wednesday from 1-2 PM EDT. During each session, (up to) 5 teams will move into their own Zoom breakout room to discuss their question/issue directly with the appropriate OLCF staff. Topics can be anything from issues building your code, non-ideal performance, node failures, etc.

To help ensure proper expertise available to discuss your issue, please follow the below steps to let us know about your issue and request an available time slot.

If you encounter issues during sign-up, please contact help@olcf.ornl.gov.

  • Login to your Moderate account at myOLCF

  • Expand the OFFICE HOURS dropdown (on the sidebar navigation)

  • There are 2 options to select: Schedule a Time and View Your Scheduled Office Hour(s)

Schedule a Time - Fill out the required fields in the form. On the date selection, use the arrows to scroll between months and then click on a specific day. Once a day is selected, choose an available time slot by clicking the Reserve a Spot button. Once all the required fields are filled in and a time slot is selected you can submit the form.

View Your Scheduled Office Hour(s) - This will show you your office hours for the current project you have selected. If you have an office hour scheduled and don’t see it there, make sure you have the correct project selected from the MY PROJECTS dropdown on the top of the page.

Communication to Users

System statuses

System statuses can be found on the Center Status page. Alternatively, The OLCF homepage includes a listing of our major compute resources and their current availability, as well as upcoming downtimes. Similarly, the status of a particular system can be found on its respective System User Guide. When a system’s state changes (up to down, or down to up), an automated message is sent to the system’s notice mailing list.

Weekly Updates

Each week, typically on Wednesday morning, an email announcing the next week’s scheduled outages is sent to all users. This message also includes meeting announcements and other items of interest to all OLCF users.

Mailing Lists

Our primary systems each have two mailing lists, Announcement and Notice.

Announcement lists provide users with email messages of general interest (system upgrades, long-term outages, etc.) Since the mailing frequency is low and the information sent is important to all users, users are automatically subscribed to the appropriate Announcement lists when their account is created and are required to remain members of these lists as long as the account remains active. Notice lists provide a higher-volume email notification system. A system’s Notice list will automatically announce system state changes and other notable system events. Users who are actively using a system are automatically added to a system’s Notice list. When a system changes state (up to down, or down to up), an automated email is sent to members of the system’s notice list. We also send additional notable issues and time sensitive events to these lists.

Available Notice lists include: rhea-notice, and spider-notice. If you wish to be added or removed, please contact help@olcf.ornl.gov.

myOLCF

To assist users in managing their project allocations and system usage, we provide the My OLCF web application. My OLCF can be accessed at https://my.olcf.ornl.gov/ with a valid OLCF username and SecurID fob passcode. MyOLCF provides valuable information about projects and the ability to renew or request new access.

Additional information about myOLCF can be found in the myOLCF section.