If you have any questions or need assistance, please email help@scc.bu.edu. This email will be seen by our entire team and one of us will reply to you.
For software installation requests, please fill out this form rather than emailing us.
Writing an effective support request
Writing an effective support request is not only good for the support team; it is also better for you! The easier it is to understand your request and the more details it contains, the faster we can evaluate it and the less back and forth communication is needed. Below is a list of best practices.
Do not contact team members directly
Always send requests to help@scc.bu.edu and team members will respond there. This makes sure that somebody will see your request even if one of our team members is out of the office. Feel free to mention the name of a particular team member if you have worked with them before.
Include actual commands, error messages, and paths
To help you we will need as much of the following information as you can provide:
- Software package/programming language you are using
- Commands and scripts you run
- Full path to your scripts and log files
- Job information such as jobID, job name and/or the date when you ran it
- Complete error message
- Environment information (e.g. modules you load, conda environment you use, etc.)
- Information on how to reproduce the issue.
Include a general description of what you are trying to accomplish.
We may be able to recommend alternative ways to accomplish the same task by using different tools or functions that are less error prone and more efficient.
Let us know what you have done so far to try and solve your issue
This page was heavily inspired by the CIRC Help Page at UT-Dallas, which was itself inspired by “How to write good support requests” by the HPC group – UiT The Arctic University of Norway.