What about training: rinnnnnnnng, rinnnnnnnng, rinnnnnnnn
Authors: Christine Martin
Venue: Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM SIGUCCS Conference on User Services (1988)

Consultant: Hello, SDSC Consulting. Can I help you? User: Hi! Yes, please. I'll be getting an account on your system and am interested in any kind of training you do for users. First of all, do you have any courses for the novice user and/or the user who's been using the system a while? C: Yes, for the new users we have two days of introductory workshops, four in all. For those who already know the basics and want to get beyond logging in, we offer an additional day of material, divided into two workshops. U: That sounds good! How often do you hold your classes? Once a month? C: Well, for the first two years, we did teach the courses once a month, often twice a month. However, we've found that our average user has become more knowledgeable about the system, and the requests for the intro-courses have therefore been declining, so we're teaching once a quarter now. Basically the number of courses we teach is determined by you, the users; we're flexible to teach as many or as few as you request. U: It sounds like we users can help determine what services we get! Does that mean that if enough of us were to want you to teach courses on any other topics in the future you might? C: Certainly!! In fact, the advanced workshops started just last fall as a result of requests from users. We're also planning to develop courses to cover graphics and two other programming languages: C and Pascal. The plans for these courses have been developed based on both direct requests and a need by users that we've noted from the number of questions that our consultants get in these areas. U: Great, I'll look forward to hearing more about these! Let me push my luck: in addition to your flexibility with what is taught and how often it's taught, how about where it's taught? Would you consider teaching at our university, for example, if we had 15 or 20 interested people? C: Absolutely! In our first year alone, we traveled to five different sites and in the second year we went to six additional sites. We've gone from Maryland to Hawaii for our users! (Are you by chance calling from Hawaii?) U: Well no, we're in Plainsville, so how about if we come to SDSC? Can you describe your training facilities there and accommodations for out-of-towners? C: Sure. We've got a nice training room with 20 Mac Pluses for the students, plus one hooked to a projector for the instructor, all of which are hooked directly to our CRAY supercomputer. In addition, there is a white board and an overhead projector, in case the instructor wants to use them. As for accommodations, users can stay anywhere they like, at their own expense. There are many nearby hotels which we can recommend. We only provide accommodations during our two-week, in-depth summer institutes. U: That sounds reasonable, as long as they're near the beach! What about handouts or documents. Do you provide any of these? C: Of course! With each of the four introductory and two advanced courses we give each user a handout that the instructor goes over. Like all our documents, each of these is online so any user can print out copies of them at any time. In fact, while students are here they can print out and take with them any documents they think they might need in addition to those covered during the course. We've got almost 14,000 pages! U: Great! Sounds like I can get all the reading I could ever want! You mentioned a bunch of terminals in the training room. Does that mean that we also get a chance to work on the CRAY while we're there, or are the classes all lecture? C: Oh, no! You definitely get plenty of time to use the CRAY during class, in some classes more than in others. There's a mix in each class of lecture, lecture while the teacher demonstrates online (sometimes with students also online) and pure practice time when the instructor moves around helping everyone. The exact format of a particular class depends on the topics covered. U: OK, I like the sound of that. One more thing: could you please tell me a bit more about your current courses? That is, tell me what is covered in each? C: Sure! On the morning of the first day we cover the INTROWORK1 document, which discusses how to access the computers here from different sites; CTSS, the CRAY operating system, and its routines; our long-term storage system, known as CFS, and how to access it using MASS; as well as file transfers over various networks. During the afternoon on the first day we go over the INTROWORK2 document, which covers different information sources available to you and two editors that we have available: TEDI and SED. The information sources include our online documentation system, the electronic bulletin boards, and sending and receiving electronic mail. On the second day we start with EZCFT, which is the handout describing the CRAY Fortran Compiler. On that morning we go over converting programs from other systems to run on our CRAY, compiling and loading the programs, then figuring out what some of the run-time errors you can get might mean. We also touch on vectorization, which is covered more in-depth in an advanced workshop. In the afternoon of the second day we discuss the INTROWORK4 document. This includes using the Dynamic Debugging Tool, DDT, using Pascal and C, and the math and graphics libraries available to you, as well as a utility we have for displaying and transporting graphics files. U: Wow! I guess I'd better stay awake for those sessions! What's left to teach in the advanced workshops? C: Well, in the morning we cover EZJOBCONTROL, which is the Common Command Language. In the afternoon we go over OPTIMIZATION, which includes monitoring optimization and requirements for, impediments to, and techniques for vectorization. U: I'm impressed, but I'm afraid to ask one last thing. I suppose all this must cost a bundle. Right? What do you charge? C: Why nothing of course! We even throw in coffee and pastries for morning breaks each day, and sodas and cookies in the afternoons! U: What a deal! I want to go to San Diego!! Where do I sign up?