HPC Carpentry: Recent Progress and Incubation Toward an Official Carpentries Lesson Program

Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2025), pp. 31–34

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@article{jocse-16-1-7,
  author={Andrew Reid and Trevor Keller and Alan O'Cais and Annajiat Alim Rasel and Wirawan Purwanto and Jane Herriman and Benson Muite and Marc-Andr\'{e} Hermanns},
  title={HPC Carpentry: Recent Progress and Incubation Toward an Official Carpentries Lesson Program},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2025,
  month=mar,
  volume=16,
  issue=1,
  pages={31--34},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/16/1/7}
}

The HPC Carpentry project aims to develop highly interactiveworkshop training materials to empower novices to effectively leverage HPC to solve scientific and technical problems in their domains. Modeled after The Carpentries training programs, the project's goal is to develop foundational HPC skills and a sense of empowerment, rather than expertise. The workshop setting provides learners with hands-on experience that elicits confidence working with HPC systems and provides sufficient vocabulary to make subsequent self-study more effective. In a major milestone, the steering committee is leading HPC Carpentry through the formal incubation process to become an official Carpentries lesson program alongside the existing Software, Data, and Library Carpentry programs. This achievement is the product of significant work over the past several years, incorporating valuable materials from many contributors. Our most recent focus has been developing materials for a user workshop.We begin with an introduction to the command-line shell (using Software Carpentry's Unix Shell lesson), followed by our Introduction to HPC lesson, covering remote access and resource management. We end with a newly developed lesson on HPC workflow management, which walks learners through the execution of a scaling study on an HPC system, emphasizing both the benefits and limitations of the system for domain applications. This workshop program was recently run in full at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Future plans include building a developer workshop, reconnecting with disparate contributors, and engaging with the broader community through regular open conference calls and outreach.