Enhancing HPC Education through Virtual Cluster Administration and Benchmarking

Volume 16, Issue 2 (November 2025), pp. 16–21

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@article{jocse-16-2-4,
  author={Charles Ross Lindsey and Jeffrey Valdez and Aaron Jezghani and Will Powell and Richard Vuduc},
  title={Enhancing HPC Education through Virtual Cluster Administration and Benchmarking},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2025,
  month=nov,
  volume=16,
  issue=2,
  pages={16--21},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/16/2/4}
}

The rapid advancement in high-performance computing (HPC) poses significant challenges for the HPC community. Current HPC training approaches often are too generic or too customized to local environments, limiting their applicability and impact. Often, these shortcomings are due to the limited accessibility, excessive cost, and specialized support necessary to provide HPC environments for teaching. To address these challenges, we introduce Virtual Cluster, a hardware-agnostic platform designed to provide an easy-to-configure, generalizable, and scalable approach to HPC system management for training and education in computational research alongside production system configurations. We implemented this platform in a virtually integrated project (VIP) course aimed at training undergraduates for HPC cluster building. Drawing from our experience from the VIP course, we advocate for the integration of more comprehensive educational and training approaches, such as HPC Virtual Cluster, to better support HPC.