workshop – SIGHPC Education Blog

Menlo-Atherton High School’s First Ever Coding Career Conference

Hi again! For a quick reminder, my name is Amelia and I am a sophomore at Menlo-Atherton High School (M-A) in Atherton, California. Last year, I founded the Menlo-Atherton Coding Club for Teens – a school club designed to teach coding languages to both members and younger kids in the community. Currently, we host two sessions a week over Zoom as our club has expanded to over 45 active members! A senior at M-A teaches Go (a programming language designed by Google that is similar to C) for the first session, and I partnered with a college student to teach Python for the second session. A few months ago, we had the chance to represent the M-A Coding Club in person for Club Rush, where due to Covid-19 students drove through carpool to learn about the different clubs on campus. Below is an image of me along with two club members at Club Rush.

In April of 2021, I led M-A’s First Ever Coding Career Conference- a two day conference where over 40 students joined to hear about different career paths in the computer science area. I had this idea a few months ago as I personally am interested in learning about jobs in the technology sector, and thought about how other students must be interested too! The mini conference over Zoom was centered around the theme of the advantages and disadvantages of tech jobs at big companies versus small companies.

Virtual Workshop: Toward a globally acknowledged and free HPC Certification

by Weronika Filinger

The HPC Certification Forum has been around for almost 2 years now so it’s only natural that the scope of its activities is beginning to shift from the necessary groundwork towards an actual certification. Although a lot still needs to be done in terms of refining the skill description, identifying the gaps in the defined skills, and creating a sufficiently big poll of examination questions, it is crucial now to get more support from the HPC education and training community. For the HPC Certification to work as envisioned, it needs to be recognised, and we believe that for that to happen it must be a community driven effort.

Normally, the Forum meets face-to-face twice a year – at ISC and SC conferences. The ISC meeting had to be cancelled due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, and so the Forum decided to hold a virtual workshop in mid May. To make it possible for the international members from the regions of America, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand to participate, two sessions were organised. The presentations, besides the introduction – providing the context, and the last talk – focusing on the certification process, included talks from both organisations that already collaborate with the Forum and those who would like to do so in the future.

The Supercomputing and Robotics with NVIDIA Xavier Workshop in Marrakech Dec 2018

By Frank Domoney

Professor Mousannif and I ran a six-day workshop covering the essential skills to build a highly automated factory. Digital Twinning of Future Smart Factories will require enormous amounts of computing capacity (see this article for more details) that successfully integrates Supercomputing and the Robotics stream of the European definition of Artificial Intelligence.

Workshop: GROMACS in Riga

Benson Muite, University of Tartu

GROMACS is a free and open source parallel molecular dynamics software. It is used by a wide variety of people, particularly for biomolecular and chemistry simulations. It is one of the most efficient open source molecular dynamics packages with a strong community influenced development model and a wide userbase. Continue reading “Workshop: GROMACS in Riga”

Containers for bioinformatics: a hands-on workshop

Brian Skjerven and Marco De La Pierre, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

In the past year, staff at the Pawsey supercomputing centre in Perth, Australia, have been investigating the deployment of containers on HPC resources to address several major issues researchers face when migrating workflows to HPC: complex software stacks and dependencies, cross-platform portability, reproducibility of results, and difficulties in collaboration. A solution has been devised, which involves a combination of Docker and Shifter container engines, where the former allows building as well as deployment on cloud systems, and the latter deployment on HPC clusters. Continue reading “Containers for bioinformatics: a hands-on workshop”