Birds of a Feather

Designing HPC Outreach Activities

Authors: Weronika Filinger (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), University of Edinburgh), Julie Mullen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory), Lauren Milechin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)), Scott Callaghan (University of Southern California (USC)), Karina Pesatova (IT4Innovations), Eleanor Broadway (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC)), Bryan Johnston (ACE Lab, Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), South Africa), Ann Backhaus (Pawsey)

Abstract: HPC Outreach is essential to enthusing young minds about computational science, informing the public and growing the HPC community, and yet many institutions do not have sufficient funding or staff effort to support the outreach activities. Effective outreach requires well designed activities that are suitable to the target audience and event type. Different activities are needed for different age groups, scientific backgrounds or venues. Each activity also has its own lifecycle and cannot be reused indefinitely. The goal of this session is to design several new activities that the community would be able to develop over the coming year.

Long Description: Outreach is essential to sustainable growth of any community, but it tends to be even more important for fields like HPC. Not many people are exposed to the concepts of HPC and supercomputing in their everyday lives. Most researchers working in their science domain are very task-driven so encountering HPC often requires taking a detour. Similarly, there are very few opportunities for non-STEM students (and even for STEM students) to learn about HPC. Those opportunities are even rarer for K-12 students and the general public. To attract new and diverse talent we need to actively promote the field. Since 2018 a number of BoF sessions has been run at SC and other conferences, with the more recent events emphasizing the need for community effort to collect the existing and design new HPC outreach activities. This coordinated effort is needed because most of the institutions don’t have sufficient time, staff effort or budget dedicated to outreach. It’s often not straightforward to convince policy makers and upper management to increase their spending on outreach.

The scope of HPC outreach (from general audience, K-12 to higher education students and potential new users) requires a very broad range of activities. Effective outreach requires using materials that are relevant to the target audience - if the materials are not at the right level to match the recipients’ current understanding of computing, they will not achieve the desired effect. Outreach to different communities and at different event types require different materials. Additionally, most of the activities, games, demos etc. cannot be used indefinitely in the same context. Every activity has its lifecycle and even adapting and reusing the existing activities require time and effort. Moreover, most outreach is done by volunteers, so even at a single institution that group of volunteers can change frequently, making the coordinated outreach effort more difficult.

How can we make the design, creation and deployment of outreach activities easier? How can we make them more FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable? What kind of material can we create to reduce the burden on the volunteers running the activities? The goal of this session is to 1) gather the feedback on what metadata is required for outreach activities to make them easier to use and 2) to design outlines for several new outreach activities that include Instructor Guidelines. The HPC outreach community of practice (OCoP) created at SC’22 will prepare a draft of the required metadata (based on the existing examples, such as that from the DReSA / Elixir’s TeSS) which then will be used during the session to design new activities in breakout groups. Those outlines will be then uploaded to the SIGHPC Education Chapter Outreach repository. We intend to grow the OCoP and encourage small teams to take up these activities after SC’23 and fully implement them. Anyone interested or involved in HPC outreach is invited to attend and contribute, including students.



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