How to ask for help - Scientific Computing Summer Kickstart 2021

This talk is about how we can all improve the dialogue between supercomputer user community and staff. How to formulate support requests to get a useful answer and how to approach problems to find solutions sooner. But it is also aiming at support staff so that we always remain respectful and try to learn and solve problems together.

During this talk, the Fastly CDN went down and broke a lot of the internet. We left that discussion in there because it was a bit interesting at the time, and hopefully you can be entertained by it now.

00:00 Why we are talking now?
00:43 Introduction of the speaker
01:33 Is Twitch down?
02:43 What is this talk about?
03:17 Begin talk
06:53 Who is on the other side?
10:10 Making a good issue
13:57 Formulate your question
16:38 The XY problem
19:50 Intermission: The internet is broken!
22:30 First time on a new machine?
27:03 Create a small reproducible example
30:45 Summary
32:50 Q&A

This is part of the Aalto Scientific Computing Summer Kickstart workshop. The videos are available to everyone, but may be most useful to the people who attended the workshop and want to review later.