In 2013, 279 users participated in a user survey that addressed 14 NAS service areas. This report provides a summary of the survey results and information on related activities undertaken over the last year to improve performance in several key areas: job management and queuing, file systems and storage, data transfer to and from the NAS facility, and software licenses.

Download the 2013 NAS User Survey Results (PDF-131KB)

Survey Highlights

Responses to the 2013 survey were reasonably representative of the work distribution across the mission directorates. Highlights include:

• Overall Satisfaction: 4.26 (Very Good)
• Highest-Scoring Categories: Control Room and Compute Power
• Most Improved Service: Training

Actions

Based on your feedback, we have taken numerous steps to improve our services and capability in several categories. Improvements include:

• Augmenting Pleiades processing power with Ivy Bridge racks
• Deploying a new version of the PBSPro batch scheduler and implementing Dynamic PBSPro queue management
• Improving and enhancing the InfiniBand network fabric
• Deploying a new NFS file system and a new Lustre file system, and a new Lou archival system with the parallel Data Migration Facility
• Acquiring eight additional Matlab licenses, one additional Statistics Toolbox license, and providing better IDL license usage guidelines