Letter From the Director Survey Results Inform Future Decisions

Dear colleagues,

I'm writing to you regarding the survey that ICER recently administered to our allocation PIs and users, as well as to potential users of research computing.

I would like to express my thanks to the 462 people who took the time to complete the survey. It is clear that ICER's services are crucial to the success of many researchers on campus, and that the vast majority of our PIs and users are either somewhat or extremely satisfied with them. That said, your feedback has provided us with excellent ideas for how we can improve ICER in the future to better support your scholarly endeavors. We intend to deploy some changes to the HPCC and to user support and training over the coming months in response to this feedback and will announce those as they roll out.

I'd also like to thank the almost 200 researchers who are potentially interested in using research computing, but who have not yet done so, for sharing their thoughts with us. The ease of access to large digital datasets has impacted essentially every field of study, including many areas that have not traditionally been users of research computing. This presents challenges, but also tremendous opportunities. Feedback from potential users in these areas has helped to inform ICER about their needs, which will help us to decide how to allocate our computational and human resources to best address them.

Thanks again to all of you who shared your thoughts with us. We appreciate you giving your time in this way and will use the information gathered to make changes that will help you with your research and teaching endeavors.

Go green!

Sincerely,

Brian O'Shea
Director, ICER
Professor, Departments of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering and Physics and Astronomy