Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) & Support
General Questions
Section titled “General Questions”Who can use Berkelium?
Section titled “Who can use Berkelium?”Any researcher, staff scientist, postdoc, or visiting affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with an active @lbl.gov OneID account. External collaborators can be added as namespace members by an LBNL project PI.
How is Berkelium different from Perlmutter at NERSC?
Section titled “How is Berkelium different from Perlmutter at NERSC?”- Perlmutter (NERSC): Large-scale leadership HPC designed primarily for tightly-coupled MPI simulations and multi-thousand GPU batch jobs scheduled via Slurm.
- Berkelium (Science IT): Agile, cloud-native Kubernetes cluster built for interactive Jupyter workloads, microservices, containerized data pipelines, Ray/Dask distributed processing, beamline streaming analytics, and self-service APIs.
Are resources free for LBNL scientists?
Section titled “Are resources free for LBNL scientists?”Standard development and scientific compute tiers are subsidized by Science IT baseline infrastructure. Dedicated multi-GPU allocations (e.g. 8x H100 dedicated nodes) or massive multi-petabyte Ceph storage allocations can be sponsored through division recharge accounts or grant projects.
Technical Questions
Section titled “Technical Questions”Why is my pod in Pending state?
Section titled “Why is my pod in Pending state?”Common causes:
- Resource exhaustion: Your namespace has hit its
ResourceQuota(checkkubectl describe quota -n <namespace>). - GPU constraints: You requested a GPU model (
nvidia.com/gpu: 4) when all requested nodes are actively running other jobs. - PVC Binding: Your PersistentVolumeClaim hasn’t bound or has an invalid storage class name.
How do I attach persistent storage to my containers?
Section titled “How do I attach persistent storage to my containers?”Use the cephfs-sc or nvme-scratch StorageClasses in your PersistentVolumeClaim manifest. Refer to our Storage & PVC Guide.
Getting Technical Support
Section titled “Getting Technical Support”- Slack Channel:
#berkelium-userson LBNL Slack. - Office Hours: Every Tuesday & Thursday from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT.
- Consultation Form: Submit questions via the Science IT Consultation Page.
- Email:
scienceit-k8s@lbl.gov