Other Initiatives – SIGHPC Education Blog

SC22 Mini-series: Early Career Program and its Past Participants

This blog entry was reposted from the RSE stories and combines two posts.

Marina Kraeva is a Senior Research Computing Systems Analyst at Iowa State University and this year’s Early Career Program Subcommittee Chair. In this episode, Marina tells us about the history of the Early Career Program (ECP) at Supercomputing, the overarching goals of ECP, and what potential participants can expect to learn this year!

She encourages all professionals in their early career to apply for the program this year, taking place in Dallas, TX, as part of Supercomputing 2022. To apply, go to the Early Career Program page and click “Application Details.”

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.

SciNet’s Summer School: a decade-old tradition

re-posted from the SciNet blog

Most would associate summertime with a relaxing and leisurely season of the year. However, HPC centres like SciNet, as in many others around the world, perceive this differently and are actually quite busy during this period.

Among the many activities SciNet carries out during the summer “break” are workshops and short courses. These activities are scheduled in the summer to fit between the term-long courses that SciNet offers to graduate students at the University of Toronto.

In particular, one of SciNet’s oldest training activities is a one-week intensive school on high-performance and technical computing. This annual summer school is our flagship training event, and is aimed at graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, researchers and occasionally even faculty members, who are engaged in compute intensive research. SciNet’s first such summer school was given in 2009, at which time it was called a “Parallel Scientific Computing” workshop. This first version of the school was heavily focused on parallel programming and applications in astrophysics.

HPC Certification Program – the HPC environment survey

Jean-Thomas Acquaviva, DDN Storage

Supercomputers are helping us to solve the world greatest challenges but who is helping us to harness the computational power of supercomputers?

The HPC Certification Forum is a community effort that aims to provide an international certification program for the skills needed by practitioners to harness supercomputers. The HPC Certification Forum aims to clearly categorise, define, and examine competencies, which will be beneficial to all stake-holders involved in training and education. To make this effort relevant to the whole HPC community, a number of on-line surveys and polls will be created in order to capture and estimate the importance of various tools, technologies and skills that are expected from HPC practitioners.

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.