4th Workshop

Fourth SC Workshop on

Best Practices for HPC Training

Abstract

We propose to conduct a fourth annual half-day workshop on HPC training during the SC17 Conference.

Community interest in HPC training continues to grow as the organizers work to promote this critically important topic internationally. The efforts of the SC16 Conference, the Technical Program Committee, and the HPC Training workshop organizers to actively recruit participants resulted in more than 100 people attending the SC16 workshop. There continues to be strong international community participation via submissions, presentations and attendance during the annual SC Conference and through the year-long engagement efforts.

As a result of the extensive community need and interest in HPC training, and the significant level of community engagement at the previous SC Conference workshops on HPC training, the International HPC Training Consortium continues to flourish and grow. The Consortium conducts the planning and implementation of the SC HPC Training workshops, and the Consortium members engage in year-long efforts to sustain the interests identified during the SC workshops. Membership in the Consortium has grown from 70 individuals at SC16 to over 100 people from 18 countries.

The SC17 workshop will be used to highlight the results of collaborative efforts during 2017 to develop and deploy HPC training, to identify new challenges and opportunities, and to foster new, enhanced and expanded collaborations to pursue during 2018.

Motivation

The wide response from the international community to participate in the workshops held during the SC conferences, and to contribute to year-round cooperation, provides evidence of the need for continuing to bring together people that develop and deliver HPC training world-wide. From polls and surveys conducted among the Consortium members and during the SC16 workshop, it is clear that there are common challenges for enhancing HPC training, and numerous opportunities for sharing and collaborating, across the globe.

Most training groups report that they have limited staff and resources, which results in the increased interest among the community to utilize the SC workshops as a platform to share resources and materials, to identify opportunities for collaboration on the development of content, and to discuss effective strategies for enhancing the breadth and depth of high quality training that can be offered.

Computing facilities face a common challenge of supporting a diverse user base with varied skills and needs. There is a growing base of users familiar with GUI platforms and little or no LINUX experience, and who are new to the utilization of HPC resources. There are also needs for continuing education with those familiar with HPC as application development and system hardware are in a constant state of change.

Computing organizations are working to address multiple common challenges:

• • delivering content to remote users just-in-time

  • providing training on LINUX and HPC tools, technologies and resources

  • providing a range of training from basic fundamentals to advanced topics

  • providing exercises and guided instructions for practice exercises

  • identifying and filling gaps in training offerings

  • reviewing all training materials to ensure quality of the materials

  • recruiting and retaining a diverse community including women, minorities and people with disabilities

  • certifying that people have acquired skills after attending training

  • developing training on an ever-growing variety of platforms and tools

Workshop Goals

The fourth in this series of workshops will foster sharing the results of collaborations conducted during 2017 and will identify new opportunities for collaboration during 2018. To accomplish this, the community will be invited to submit short presentations highlighting collaborations among centers, and presentations on new strategies and resources that can be adopted by others to enhance HPC training.

Following the presentations, there will be open discussions on common issues raised by the participants. The organizers will use interactive polling to share views and perspectives, and to help drive the conversations. The objective is to identify collaborative activities Consortium members may pursue during 2018.

The evaluations of the SC16 workshop were extremely positive. The results provided by the SC conference committee were as follows:

• • Tech: 4.3 out of 5 (conference average was 4.4)

  • Pres: 4.6 out of 5 (conference average was 4.3)

  • Overall: 4.5 out of 5 (conference average was 4.4)

  • Program: 4.5 out of 5 (conference average was 4.4)

Our goal is to garner equally positive evaluations with the SC17 workshop.

The workshop will produce a report highlighting the accomplishments of the previous year, challenges for 2018, and action plans for 2018.

Workshop scheduling information

Based on the attendance at the SC16 workshop, and growing interest in this year-long set of activities, we anticipate more than 150 people from multiple international organizations will attend the SC17 workshop. A workshop report will be produced within three months after the completion of the Conference.

Format

There will be approximately 6-8 presentations. Based on the lessons learned from the SC16 workshop presentations, we will split the presentations into two categories. There will be about 3-4 presentations on “tried and true” results appropriate for collaboration and scaling-up, and about 3-4 presentations on new and innovative approaches that are opportunities for collaboration and further development and evaluation in 2018. The workshop session will then conduct an open discussion for information sharing and polling of the audience to help determine activities to pursue during 2018. Polling of the audience has been found to be extremely beneficial for providing everyone with a “voice” to share ideas and information among a large gathering of over 100 people.

Proposed Schedule:

• 2:00-2:10 pm Welcome and Goals • 2:10-2:25 pm Presentation 1 – Tried and True Successes • 2:25-2:40 pm Presentation 2 – Tried and True Successes • 2:40-2:55 pm Presentation 3 – Tried and True Successes • 3:00-3:30 pm Break • 3:30-3:45 pm Presentation 4 – New and Innovative Approaches • 3:45-4:00 pm Presentation 5 – New and Innovative Approaches • 4:00-4:15 pm Presentation 6 – New and Innovative Approaches • 4:15-5:15 pm Open Discussion and Polling of Audience • 5:15-5:30 pm Review Next Steps and Action Plans • 5:30 pm Adjourn

Outcomes

We continue to build upon and extend the same public google site (https://sites.google.com/a/lbl.gov/hpc-training-best-practices/) to collect presentation materials and links to training resources, to post polling results, to provide summaries of monthly conference calls, and to provide information about HPC training topics of general interest to the international community.

A number of collaborations have resulted from the SC16 workshop. Among the collaborations are three webinars series being planned for 2017 on workflows, visualization, and software libraries. Additionally, collaborative proposals and development efforts have resulted.

We will continue to work as an international team committed to common goals and interests to achieve the following outcomes.

• • Attendees will gain access to results of collaborative ventures.

  • Attendees will learn about new challenges they might work on together.

  • Participants will exchange perspectives and share expertise.

  • Participants will be able to establish collaborations for the following year.

  • Action plans for continued collaboration among HPC training groups will be developed.

  • Additional people and organizations are expected to join the Consortium.

  • Improved and expanded training resources will be made available to the community.

Attracting participants

Our participants come from a range of international institutions including universities, labs and industry. We will recruit participants using a number of mechanisms. The workshop will be announced via mailing lists of over 6,000 trainers and educators who have attended previous computational science education and SC education events. The workshop will be advertised through the International HPC Training Consortium, ACM SIGHPC, HPCWire, InsideHPC, the Internal Science Grid This Week (iSGTW) newsletter, the XSEDE newsletter, the HPC Facility community, through postings on the SIGHPC Facebook, announced on the www.hpcuniversity.org portal and multiple social media avenues.

Timeline

January-October, 2017: Monthly International Consortium conference calls.

March, 2017: Workshop website goes live upon being accepted to SC17 Conference

May, 2017: Call for presentations issued internationally.

August, 2017: Finalize Invited Talks; update website with presentation abstracts.

September, 2017: Advertise workshop internationally to recruit participants.

November, 2017: Conduct workshop during SC17 Conference.

February 2018: Workshop report released.

Topics to cover

There will be an open call for topics from among the international community. Consortium members will be asked to help rank the presentations to determine the topics of greatest relevance to the community.

Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• • Best practices for training

  • Recruiting and retaining diverse individuals and communities

  • Certification of knowledge acquisition from training

  • Processes to review training content

  • Strategies to address early- and mid-career professionals

  • Delivering effective training

  • Determining training gaps

  • Evaluation of training

Activities to pursue prior to the workshop

This workshop will continue to use the web site established for the previous SC training workshops: https://sites.google.com/a/lbl.gov/hpc-training-best-practices/. The website includes the presentations, polling results, and final report from the SC17 workshop.

The organizers will continue to recruit people to join the International HPC Training Consortium, schedule monthly calls on topics of common interest, and populate the website with additional resources and materials contributed by the community.