Expanding user communities with HPC Carpentry

Volume 11, Issue 1 (January 2020), pp. 21–25

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@article{jocse-11-1-4,
  author={Alan \'{O} Cais and Peter Steinbach},
  title={Expanding user communities with HPC Carpentry},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2020,
  month=jan,
  volume=11,
  issue=1,
  pages={21--25},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/11/1/4}
}

Adoption of HPC as a research tool and industrial resource is a priority in many countries. The use of data analytics and machine learning approaches in many areas also attracts non-traditional HPC user communities to the hardware capabilities provided by supercomputing facilities. As a result, HPC at all scales is experiencing rapid growth of the demand for training, with much of this at the introductory level. To address the growth in demand, we need both a scalable and sustainable training model as well as a method to ensure the consistency of the training being offered. Adopting the successful training model of The Carpentries (https://carpentries.org/) for the HPC space provides a pathway to collaboratively created training content which can be delivered in a scalable way (serving everything from university or industrial HPC systems to national facilities). We describe the ongoing efforts of HPC Carpentry to create training material to address this need and form the collaborative network required to sustain it. We outline the history of the effort and the practices adopted from The Carpentries that enable it. The lessons being created as a result are under active development and being evaluated in practice at sites in Europe, the US and Canada.