written by Kate Cahill
The utilization of computing technologies is rapidly expanding in many sectors, necessitating access to high-quality education and training materials to facilitate research computing. The demand for instructional materials, encompassing a wide range of topics related to the development and application of research computing technologies across disciplines, is crucial for both formal classroom settings, informal training, and self-paced learning.
One way to meet this need and keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of HPC educational and training material development is to improve how the community shares and finds materials.
In the Fall of 2022, educators, training developers, and stakeholders were invited to participate in the HPC Education and Training Repository Survey. The purpose of the survey was to understand potential interest in sharing and finding quality HPC education and training materials faster and more efficiently, and to help material developers to reach a larger and more diverse community of learners. The survey results from 118 respondents show a high level of interest in the topic. For example, Respondents reported that easy access to repositories of training materials from multiple organizations was either “important” or “very important” (82% of responses).
Despite the importance of access to training materials, several critical barriers to reaching appropriate materials were identified by the respondents, including finding the correct depth or level of materials; having too many materials to sort through effectively; identifying materials relevant to desired topics; and problems with search engines listing appropriate materials.
The survey results were shared at the Ninth SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education (BPHTE22) at SC22 and with the ACM SIGHPC Education Chapter repository working group and can be viewed here .
If you are interested in this topic, please consider joining the working group which is part of the Computational Science Education Committee, contact Kate Cahill.
The survey was developed and conducted by Kate Cahill, David Joiner, Scott Lathrop, Susan Mehringer, JP Navarro, and Aaron Weeden.