Synergy of HPC Training and Research Software Development
One major mission of Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2) is to empower more users, research software engineers, and researchers to use high-performance computing (HPC) resources more efficiently. Thus, our HPC training programs, embedded in the educational efforts of the National High-Performance Computing Alliance (NHR), are offered for diverse topics to all members of German universities and publicly funded research institutions. These events are generally organized in hybrid format to facilitate remote participation. Furthermore, interactive hands-on elements are incorporated in most courses to give convenient access for participants.
Our regular HPC program has a “ladder” structure, where courses build on top of each other, and is offered on a rolling basis. This allows participants to join at any time and at a suitable level. The “HPC course ladder” covers a wide range of topics, beginning with Linux usage on HPC clusters to performance optimization targeting research software engineers. Furthermore, focused training workshops are also offered for specific topics, such as the Julia programming language, HPC tools and emerging computing technology.
Hackathons for PC2 user projects in many scientific domains, like quantum computing and FPGA acceleration, are organized to further promote the research software development. In addition, PC2 scientific staff are actively involved in the user and developer communities for atomistic simulations, e.g. CP2K and CP-PAW.
At PC2 we also provide access to modern hardware, particularly GPUs and FPGAs, and services like Continuous Integration (CI) for research software development. These synergistic effects enhance collaboration and community building between the users and PC2 scientific staff.