D4.2: Final Training Report
Creators: name: Tiina Leiponen
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: This deliverable is the final report of all PRACE-6IP WP4 (training) activities. These training activities were sustained during the two extension periods of the PRACE-6IP project.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous effect on training activities, boosting the transition of face-to-face courses and schools to online format. Despite the postponement and cancellations of some courses and training events in this exceptional timeframe WP4 still managed to deliver 396 PTC courses, delivered eight Seasonal Schools in Slovenia, Belgium, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Austria, Finland, and Israel, converted the PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) into a virtual programme and delivered eight MOOCs and two BOFs for students during ISC 2021 and 2022. An advanced online workshop was organised as a collective effort by three PTCs, which was delivered as three online events in spring 2022.
PTCs network expanded by Austria, Belgium, Slovenia and Sweden in 2019. From May 2019 to December 2022, the PTCs have collectively delivered 396 courses, representing 1,045 days of training with 13,225 participants. This includes the 2019-2020, 2020-2021, 2021-2022 and fall 2022 PTC programmes. The COVID-related changes to online courses have been attractive to participants from Europe. Most PTCs have continued mainly with online training up to the end of PRACE-6IP project – this has allowed a wider participant scope and range than in face-to-face training.
Three on-demand events were organised in the PRACE-6IP project, in 2019 with the EUDAT and BioExcel CoE projects, 2021 in Slovenia as online event. Three International HPC Summer Schools (IHPCSS) were organised: 2019 School in Kobe, Japan, 2020 school was postponed to 2021 due to pandemic, as an online event, and 2022 live edition in Athens, Greece.
The PRACE Summer of HPC is a summer internship programme for students mentored by HPC experts from participating PRACE partner sites. In 2019, 25 projects and 25 students were hosted at HPC centres. In 2020, SOHPC was transferred to remote mentoring programme of 50 students participated in 25 projects across HPC partners. In 2021 edition, the collaboration with CERN, PRACE HPC centres and GÉANT network was used to benchmark High Throughput Processing (HTP) on PRACE TIER-0 systems with 66 students working online in 33 projects. The 2022 edition was prepared as an in-kind contribution by the partners, with 29 students and 22 projects provided with face-to-face and online mentoring.
PRACE has delivered eight MOOCs running on the FutureLearn platform on a periodic basis (i.e. some repeat runs of the same MOOC), which have attracted a total of 7475 active learners (16568 enrolments). The PRACE Training and Events Portals were updated with new functionalities to improve the user experience. The Training Portal was redesigned to be consistent with the PRACE web site, and made easier for users to identify relevant courses. Training materials were made to match the Carpenter style of study packages in modified CodeVault.
Training collaboration has been an important asset in PRACE. The training development collaboration has continued with CERN, GÉANT and SKA. Training alignment with FocusCoE and CASTIEL has been continued in creating a joint training platform and exchange of best practices as well as workshop organisation together with ETP4HPC especially related to training for industry.