CI Professionals

International HPC Training Consortium

CI Professionals Discussion

September 23, 2016

This discussion was spawned from discussions at the XSEDE16 Conference, held in July of 2016. During that Conference there was considerable discussion about the need for more efforts to prepare and support CI Professionals. This includes the preparation of the workforce.

Members of the ACI-REF Virtual Residency Program joined the call. More details on this program are at https://shareok.org/handle/11244/15262

The ACI-REF Virtual Residency Program began with a one week bootcamp. This has been followed by a series of bi-weekly calls to keep the conversation and information sharing active. Topics included "how to talk with researchers". The participants are apprentices. Everyone mentors everyone. The goal is to have a second workshop when the apprentices become the session leaders.

We seek to build on efforts like the Virtual Residency to expand the content and to scale-up the effort.

The discussion began by asking what types of positions (job titles?) should be included when we discuss CI Professionals? The following were suggested:

• VPR

• HPC Evangelist

• folks supporting computational research.

• Computational Scientists

• Research Consultant, Directors and Associate/Assistant Directors in Research Computing/Data Analytics departments

• CI facilitators, Systems Administrators (esp HPC), Computer Scientists, General scientists (at least people with some back ground in what the users will be attempting to do)

• Professor

• System administrator

• Computational scientists and researchers involved in the training of upcoming computational scientists.

• Research Support Technician HPC Manager HPC Systems Administrator Research Computing Specialist Research Computing Manager

• Staff Scientists, User Support, Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators

• Academic/Research Liaison, CI Consultant to Faculty

• Anyone doing anything remotely related to enabling CI use.

• System Administrators, Computational Scientists, Facilitators, HPC Directors

• HPC System Admins

• Computer Scientists, System Administrators

• Research Support Analyst

• Faculty Liaison

• CI facilitators, CI systems professionals, research software engineers, CI leadership

Henry Neeman presented some background on the formation of the Virtual Residency Program, which was designed to address the preparation of CI professionals. The question was asked what topics have been covered to date that were particularly useful, and what additional topics should be offered. The comments included:

• How to communicate the value of the work you do - translate it into management speak to advocate for more $$ and resources

• How to be like Henry

• Soft skills, leadership skills, proposal writing,

• How to apply for a CI grant

• CS skill refresher

• how to deal with management that do not understand they are at a research university and without that the institution would not exist.

• How to discover, access, and use national resources

• Also greatly benefitted by the explanation of the faculty tenure process in the ACI-REF training. Now I know why I have so many PhDs and Assistant Professors, and why the full professors are never in a hurry.

• Outreach and engagement tips - how to find those who don't find us

• How to communicate with people that have little or no computational skills without scaring them.

• PR skills

• Applications to education as well as research

• As an alternative career for a computational scientists the skill set required from a CI.

• What we covered in the aci-ref vr workshop: http://www.oscer.ou.edu/acirefvirtres2016.php

• Introducing new users to HPC, particularly when their applications don't support clusters and grids natively

• Soft topics "ie how to not lose your cool", Checklists "how to be prepared", "how to forge a path thru the morass of CI", "how to train and give workshops"

• Effective communication, basics of HPC (paradigms, approaches, tools), platforms for knowledge exchange/documentation, hardware basics

• CI provider best practices

• Where do we need to go to get started at different levels: For introductions, how can we get started in programming? Software Carpentry.

• soft skills (communication, talking to researchers, etc)

• Research Consulting, User expectations management (people skills)

• How to talk to your VPR or CIO

• Where do we need to go to get started at different levels

The next question asked was what type of support should be provided to CI Professionals, besides professional development?

As an example, the Virtual Residency program begins with a 1 week in-person and in-depth workshop. This is followed by bi-weekly calls to discuss topics of general interest. There will be followed by a 1 week in-person workshop in which the original participants become the lead presenters. The program thus includes initial training, mentoring, and an apprenticeship program that leads to…

Additional suggestions for support included:

• The champions list has an archive.

• I'm partial to HUBzero. We're using it here.

• a mailing list which archives discussions as Henry suggested

• Is hubzero worth looking into for a central hub for all of these types of people?

• Cake, chocolate and caffeine.

• Administration support for research computing

• A forum where issues could be discussed

• repository of mailing lists -- Henry

• Topic dependent mailing lists based on technologies and applications. Let us declare what we know and have that subscribe us to the lists. Then provide a way for people to join topics they have questions about.

• +1 on the "crucial issue"

• A collaboration portal that supports active discussion, archiving, file sharing, sub-groups,...

• The crucial issue is that your higher-ups think what you're doing matters and is worth paying for.

The next question asked people to provide links to exemplary programs now doing some or all of this. The responses included:

• Linux Clusters Institute, ACI-REF, Campus Champions, Intl HPC Training Consortium, HPC Systems Professionals, XSEDE Education/Outreach/Training/Workforce Development, NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Working Group on Learning & Workforce Development, Software/Data Carpentry, Cyberpractitioners, Cyberinfrastructure Leadership Academy, etc

• https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2949550.2949584 aci-ref vr paper

• aciref.org

• maybe involvement or introspection into vendor campus programs from Amazon, cloudera, nvidida. Also investigate what DOE, etc are doing.

• software carpentry

The discussion then focused on what could be done next to advance this discussion.

• NOTE: how do make success in CI, HPC when the operations side is run by Enterprise which has no clue how to move at the speed or research not the speed of the turtle.

• stackoverflow like portal for CI professional?

• I would like to encourage some of the active websites to start linking back to some of the other active websites, and with that link, explain why they are important to the community. Software Carpentry can point to HPC University because users can go there to get more resources on HPC. HPC University will point back to Software Carpentry as a great place to get started in fundamentals of general programming.

• ARCC

• XSEDE

• Support or Special Interest Group for Primarily Undergraduate Institutions?

• hubzero would be great. Utah group will be at SC.

• coordinating what I would have, could have, should have for all the various CI groups is enormous.

• Establish a system of accountability. I've heard certification isn't very big in the HPC world but could we at least establish who has taken training, how many years they've been working in the field, what else they've done that is allied, etc. Making that info public would help people verify us.

• A central location to keep track of what we are working on, results, what can or should be done. box folder, google drive, etc. or at least reference that enough in weekly calls and emails to make sure everyone knows. Someone needs to evangelize for the work and what needs to be done: follow up, etc.

• We need a program at the NSF like the old defunct CI-TEAM program (CI Training, Education, Advancement & Mentoring) to support new and ongoing activities of this kind. We also need to scale up all of these programs, especially to the scale that industry needs.

• I'm willing to help put up a HUBzero portal if there's interest

• Continue to work on organizing the communication among the community (outside of the current programs like ACI-REF, Campus Champions, etc)A BOF proposal was submitted to SC16 to foster more discussion on this topic at the annual conference. That proposal was declined. However, 16 people responded indicating that they would be attending SC16 and would like to see an informal meeting time arranged to continue to discuss this further. Further news on this will be announced.

Henry mentioned that HPC University may be a good portal to post and share information. The addition of a blog may be useful.

Jack and Dana will experiment with HUBzero as a possible portal to foster on-going communications and information sharing.

Henry Neeman mentioned he received an award to bring together mid-career professionals to learn from grey hairs (people who have or are nearing retirement) to ensure that lessons learned are retained among the emerging generation of leaders and innovators. There will be a workshop to bring together both audiences, with an emphasis on mid-career professionals. The goal is to foster information sharing, mentoring, working groups, etc.

It was suggested, that based on the strong level of interest in this call, that an informal meeting be scheduled at SC16 to continue this discussion. At least 16 people indicated they would like to join such a meeting. A follow-up doodle will be issued to plan for such a meeting.

It's possible that participating in Educause could lead to some white papers and best practices on this topic.

It was suggested that people join the Campus Champions program and the XSEDE Service Provider (SP) Forum.