Toward a Globally Acknowledged and Free HPC Certification: About the HPC Certification Forum
Channel: The Virtual Institute for I/O
Date: 18/05/2020

This talk introduces the workshop on 18 May, "Toward a Globally Acknowledged and Free HPC Certification".

It then introduces the HPC Certification forum, and gives an overview of its role and performed activities, the status, and strategies for long-term sustainability.

Background:
The ever-changing nature of HPC has always compelled the HPC community to focus a lot of effort on training new and existing practitioners. Historically, these efforts were tailored around a typical group of users possessing, due to their background, a certain set of programming skills. However, as HPC has become more diverse in terms of hardware, software, and the user background, the traditional training approaches became insufficient in addressing the training needs of our community. This increasingly complicated HPC landscape makes the development and delivery of new training materials challenging. During training delivery educators need to address the knowledge gaps resulting from diverse backgrounds of their learners. It is not uncommon for an attendee to come with a specific learning objective related to their work tasks and typically not interested in the core HPC knowledge. How should we develop training for users, often coming from non-traditionally HPC disciplines, and only interested in learning a particular set of skills? How can we satisfy their training needs if we don’t really understand what these are? HPC centres struggle to identify and overcome the gaps in users’ knowledge, while users struggle to identify the skills required to perform their tasks.