ACM TechNews

Europe's High-Performance Computing (HPC) Training and Education Needs Revealed in Comprehensive Survey

Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (07/15/08)

A poll of high-performance computing (HPC) training and education requirements was recently carried out among the top-tier computational users across all partner sites within the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) consortium, with the goal of assessing the current educational needs of PRACE HPC users through the evaluation of existing proficiency and satisfaction in traditional HPC methods and solicitation of users' training needs for next-generation petascale systems. The results of the survey indicate a critical need for centralized HPC training repositories and channels for the circulation of HPC technology. The poll uncovered a substantial segment of the HPC user community that lacks understanding in basic precepts of HPC programming and practice on both existing and unique architectures; a significant dearth of expertise with mixed-mode programming; an unfamiliarity with Partitioned Global Address Space languages shared by 93 percent of users; merely basic or nonexistent proficiency in multicore programming techniques in 80 percent of respondents; a belief shared by more than 90 percent of survey participants that training in performance optimization, debugging tools and techniques, code testing, and compiler optimizations would work to their advantage; and the recognition of a critical need for better HPC training programs by the majority of respondents. Most of the survey participants were excited at the prospect of benefiting from training provided by a PRACE HPC Training and Education Infrastructure, and 95 percent of respondents concurred that a pan-European centralized repository of high-quality training material that is updated on a regular basis would be advantageous.

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