Hosting a Workshop on HPC Training (July 2019) in Hamburg, Germany

In the Performance Conscious HPC (PeCoH) project we recently hosted a workshop on HPC Training, Education, and Documentation (July 30 – 31, 2019 in Hamburg, Germany) in our role as PeCoH project members. Presentation slides of all talks are available online for download. The HPC Certification Forum (HPCCF) and PeCoH are related by the fact that HPCCF was bootstrapped by the PeCoH project in order to sustain the activities within the project.

The workshop participants came from projects that are also in the DFG-Call Performance Engineering for Scientific Software, and from other institutions. In contrast to HPCCF, where HPC learning material is explicitly not in the focus, in the PeCoH project content has to be provided for basic HPC skills. For many of the other projects from the DFG call, the content production is also of central interest. The workshop was characterized by a fruitful cooperation: Immediately after the presentations the exchange of ideas took place. This also involved how content could be shared between the different projects, e.g., using an appropriate Creative Commons (CC) license model. It became clear that license type Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) is most suitable.

The HPC-Wiki, for example, which was developed in connection with the Process-Oriented Performance Engineering (ProPE) project, still uses a CC BY-SA license and it is planned to use it also for the HPC learning material produced in the PeCoH project. The interest of the other workshop participants for such a license model could be aroused.

Our own presentation (PDF) about the content production workflow and the HPC skill tree, as it is used in the PeCoH project, gave us a good opportunity to advertise the HPCCF and to demonstrate how we started it as some kind of a Spin-Off of the PecoH project. We received positive feedback for our presentation.