Getting help¶
Types of help¶
Support for research computing is a cooperative enterprise. ARC has staff who provide support, but there are many more people who provide support from outside ARC. Several of the schools and colleges have their own support staff who provide help: College of Engineering; College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Medical School/Michigan Medicine; School of Public Health.
THe combined group can provide help on a wide variety of topics: how to log into one of our cluster; basic Linux commands; getting Python or R programs to run; designing and implementing complex 'workflows' (also called 'pipelines') that combine many commands and programs; planning storage needs; and more.
Where we cannot provide direct help, we may be able to refer you to another source.
In addition to the formal support, there are also groups on campus that may be able to provide peer support. See below for more information about some of those.
How to get help¶
You can open a "request" in the ITS ticketing system call TeamDynamix by sending an e-mail message to arcts-support@umich.edu. That will initially go to our help desk. If the help desk personnel need to, they will assign your request to the appropriate support staff.
Who will help depends on your question. You can help us route your question to the right people by including some information about who you are, where in the university you are, and what project you may be working on (if any).
The following schools or colleges have their own support staff to provide assistance with using the clusters: Engineering, LSA, Medicine, and Public Health.
We assign help based first upon what the project's home school or college is.
If there is no project, or if the project is your own, then we assign help based upon your home school or college.
Finally, we may assign different help personnel if you are asking that software be installed or if you are asking for extended consulting or a partnership on a project.
In-person and by Zoom¶
There is more to research computing than just making it run, and ARC participates in a program called CoderSpaces which provides a 'community support' through scheduled meeting times and a Slack workspace.
Please see the CoderSpaces web page for more information, including meeting schedule, joining the Slack workspace, and who the staff participants are and what their fields and expertise are.
There are also special interest groups that maintain mail groups. For example, you can send questions about geospatial data analysis and design to the UM-GIS Community of Practice mail group at