By the SIGHPC Education Committee
Thank you to all who attended our SC16 BoF. We had over 40 participants! If there’s one thing you do after reading this article, please join our various communities in social media and contribute to the cause.
- https://www.facebook.com/sighpcedu/
- https://twitter.com/sighpcedu
- https://plus.google.com/communities/101759384971441116586
- https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12019017
During this meeting we reviewed the need to share, the effort to promote, and things we could do immediately to improve HPC Education broadly.
David Halstead did quick polls during the meeting where attendees could log into a URL or text responses to questions asked of the group. Then Richard Coffey and David prompted the audience to give us feedback on what topics were important to them. Three main topics came up: 1) repositories for tools, 2) modifying curriculum for HPC, and 3) what can be done immediately.
Scott Lathrop headed up the repository breakout. He and his contributors provided the following:
One of the most important findings of this group was that they are not going to be providing the one repository for all. The group considered how HPC repositories should be cross-linking and providing visibility to their peer repos. Ownership (and piracy/theft) of code examples and curriculum was a concern for some during the discussion. Keeping the repositories fresh and up-to-date is also a challenge. The other thought was how to provide excellent examples to developers of these materials. During the conversation, the SuiteSparse Matrix Collection was proffered up as thorough example: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/sparse/matrices/. Finally, there was a great deal of delving into classifications of HPC work – the need for specialized, domain specific examples as well as generally classifying and reviewing examples.
The recommendations of this group were:
- The community should search the problem domains for popular suites like SuiteSparse Matrix Collection
- A great repository should have the following: data collections, code examples, curricular models, assignments & testing materials
- HPC Education or others should provide hosting service (shared space) for metadata, pointers, and possibly the data as well
- This service should have a reviewing process, possibly like a google recommendation
- There is interest in a more formal review process that can test the ability to replicate the curriculum.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel! Talk with librarians, creative commons, and other folks who can help with metadata
Richard facilitated the “what can be done immediately” group and reported back these findings:
The general consensus is that there is too much fragmentation on the education and not enough focus. Nearly all of the breakout group members reported they didn’t know about resources such as hpcuniversity.org and csinparallel.org. There was interest in a survey out to the community asking questions like: what is the HPC maturity of your students, what are the needs of the instructors/trainers, and how does your organization support HPC education (if at all)? Additioanlly, there was interest in creating a shared virtual office where members of the organization could be called or emailed with questions on how to get going.
David led the modifying curriculum breakout and reported back the following:
There is a need for a standardized and accessible “Introduction to Computing” to help on-board students and researchers into computing enabled science. The discussion also touched on how to develop consistent templates for undergraduate computing courses. Finally, there was a great deal of interest in mechanisms and opportunities to “train the trainers”. David reported back that just sitting around talking about curriculum in the open setting helped suss out wheels already invented and lessons learned. Clearly, facilitating a self-help forum has real value for the participants.
Conclusion:
Clearly, between the working groups there were common themes. Also, one of the purposes of SIG HPC Education is to help facilitate awareness and provide cross linking. Finally, there’s opportunity for SIG HPC Education to foster opportunities such as hangouts on curriculum and developing a public forum for discussing pedagogy.