Developing pathways and structures to support HPC training

The ever-increasing demand for AI, data-intensive research processes and large-scale computation are putting a focus on the need for HPC skills. They’re also highlighting the extensive skills shortage that exists in this space within both the research and industrial environments.

One of the challenges in addressing this skills shortage is that developing specialist High Performance Computing skills takes a significant investment of time. Experts in this field often develop their skill sets in an ad hoc manner over a number of years, building expertise through on-the-job experience. If we are to address the lack of skills that we face right now, as well as supporting future generations of experts in building the necessary competencies to support and create the next stage of our AI-enabled world, we need better training structures and clear learning pathways.

The UNIVERSE-HPC project, funded as part of the ExCALIBUR programme, brings together the universities of Edinburgh, Southampton, Oxford and Imperial College London. The team are looking to better understand the training challenges in this space and working to develop pathways that are applicable to learners at a range of different existing skills. Alongside the pathways, we are capturing details of a variety of existing open source training material and filling in gaps by developing our own materials. These materials and the associated learning pathways are now accessible via a web-based tool developed by project team members at University of Oxford.

In this talk we’ll provide an overview of the challenges that UNIVERSE-HPC is looking to address, highlight our learning framework development work and update on our extensive community activities being used to support this. We’ll also highlight our aims for the next stage of the project including novel approaches to reviewing and developing new training materials through the use of community hackathons