HPC Carpentry

The HPC Carpentry project aims to develop highly interactive workshop training materials to empower novices to effectively leverage HPC to solve scientific and technical problems in their domains. This talk provides an overview of the project and its history, explores the content and delivery of HPC Carpentry workshops, and summarises the community's plans for the future. 

Modeled after The Carpentries training programs, the project’s goal is to develop foundational HPC skills and a sense of empowerment, rather than expertise. The workshop setting provides learners with hands-on experience that elicits confidence working with HPC systems and provides sufficient vocabulary to make subsequent self-study more effective.

In a major milestone, the steering committee is leading HPC Carpentry through the formal incubation process to become an official lesson program of The Carpentries, a global community teaching essential data and software skills for research. If adopted, HPC Carpentry will join the existing Software, Data, and Library Carpentry programs. This achievement is the product of significant work over the past several years, incorporating valuable materials from many contributors.

Our most recent focus has been developing materials for a user workshop. We begin with an introduction to the command-line shell (using Software Carpentry’s Unix Shell lesson), followed by our Introduction to HPC lesson, covering remote access and resource management. We end with a newly developed lesson on HPC workflow management, which walks learners through the execution of a scaling study on an HPC system, emphasizing both the benefits and limitations of the system for domain applications. This workshop program was recently run in full at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Future plans include building a developer workshop, reconnecting with disparate contributors, and engaging with the broader community through regular open conference calls and outreach.

The work described in the talk was made possible by the contributions of every HPC Carpentry community member. Thank you! The abstract was adapted from a previous conference submission, prepared by Andrew Reid, Trevor Keller, Alan O'Cais, Annajiat Alim Rasel, Wirawan Purwanto, Jane Herriman, and Benson Muite.