Birds of a Feather

Pathfinding in HPC Education and Training

Authors: Weronika Filinger (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC)), Julie Mullen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory), Ann Backhaus (Pawsey Supercomputing Center), Samantha Wittke (CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland; CodeRefinery), Jeremy Cohen (Imperial College London)

Abstract: Despite the quantity of existing training materials, acquisition and development of HPC skills is not straightforward enough to address the needs of the growing and diversifying HPC community. To address this, the HPC teaching and training ecosystem must mirror the growth and diversification of the HPC community and technologies. This BoF creates an opportunity to gather the user/learner community perspectives and explore new requirements in order to identify new entry points and build well-defined learning pathways that more accurately represent the aims of the user/learner community and changing technology landscape. We encourage those interested in HPC training to attend.

Long Description: Significant work is being invested into defining skills required of HPC practitioners in different roles (including but not limited to: Research Software Engineers, scientific software users, Data Scientists, etc.) and at different career stages. Capturing requirements is a necessary first step, but students and professionals would benefit from clear, accessible learning pathways that suggest a route to acquiring and developing the necessary skills. Adult learners seek training to solve a problem or answer a question, which naturally brings them to search engines and YouTube. Learning in this unstructured manner can lead to knowledge gaps, misunderstandings or increase the difficulty of learning new skills and extending existing ones. The wealth of existing training resources means that finding training materials at the right level and covering just the required skills is generally not straightforward. Furthermore, prospective users from communities new to HPC often don’t know what to look for or end up discovering materials that are inconsistent with their domain and/or HPC use. Training resources are also typically embedded in modules that implicitly assume prerequisites without clearly stating them and rarely indicate how different skills are interlinked. Navigating the myriad of resources to select those that are most suitable takes time and experience, presenting a significant challenge to professionals who are new to HPC.

To assist new members of the community in developing HPC skills, the teaching and training community faces several questions:

- How can we facilitate advanced learning? - What learning pathways exist for HPC skills at different levels and for different communities? - How do we create a set of well-defined and useful learning pathways that correspond to different roles within the HPC ecosystem?

The goal of this session and follow-up activities is to define several high-level learning pathways corresponding to different skill sets or roles within the HPC community. Using an interactive tool (e.g. jam board), the BoF leaders will gather a set of community derived key concepts which will serve as building blocks of the pathways. Using an online tool ensures that every participant can contribute their own perspective and all the data is captured. It also provides a way to gather the concepts into related collections and easily arrange them into pathways. To facilitate this activity, example pathways, based on commonly accepted key concepts, will be provided for the attendees to use as a reference or to modify when constructing their own pathway(s).

The pathway outlines provide two major benefits, first they encourage a shift from teaching topics in a linear manner toward concept based learning pathways that better align with adult learning models. Secondly, they are the next step in developing guidelines to make the training content more FAIR - findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Developing interoperable training materials is key to creating personalised learning pathways that directly correspond to the training needs and job requirements of HPC community members, especially in the exascale era. This session will build on results from another BoF session run at ISC’23 and will act as foundation for future activities.



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