HPC Students @ SDSC

A program for educating and training the next generation of HPC professionals and researchers

The HPC Students Program focuses on educating and training the next generation of High-Performance Computing undergraduates, graduates, professionals and researchers; motivating them to pursue HPC careers; and serving as a bridge between students and HPC-related research and researchers at SDSC. The program initially works with UCSD undergraduates, and will be expanded to include other groups as time and budget permits.

 Key Goals:

• To facilitate and increase interactions between the San Diego Supercomputer Center and UCSD students.
• To educate and train students in all things HPC: parallel programming, running applications, learning hardware.
• To connect students to the wider world of HPC through events, meetings, interactions with industry, attending meetings.
• To participate in HPC related events at SDSC/UCSD, in San Diego, and at relevant meetings. 
• To mentor students to help train the next generation of scientists

The program is committed to sponsoring and supporting student activities through funding and providing of resources. This includes:

• Interaction and outreach to UCSD Clubs, including the newly formed UCSD Supercomputing Club.
• Hosting student focused training workshops/bootcamps/hackathons/material. 
• Support and advocacy for students applying to HPC related activities including applications for graduate school, grants, support to travel to meetings, etc.
• Increased student participation at conferences & meetings, including local, national, and international.
• Providing a path to getting credit for participation via the SDSC/UCSD Co-Curricular Credit Program.
• Mentoring and sponsoring competitive teams, such as the annual Student Cluster Competitions.
• Support of SDSC and NSF broader engagement goals.

HPC Training

SDSC supports training of its user community, including students, in all aspects of High-performance computing (HPC). The HPC Students Training activity is designed to promote workforce development in technologies needed to work in HPC. The HPC Students training is provided free to all UCSD students (both graduate and undergraduate), post-docs, and other researchers. Plans are under way to offer this training to faculty, staff, and collaborators on SDSC systems.

The scope of the training effort includes several skill development activities, including:

• Study HPC architectures, software, and admin skills.
• Learn the basics of parallel programming, including MPI using C, Fortran, and possibly other languages.
• Running HPC applications in the areas of performance characterization of the cluster, bioinformatics, numerical methods, password security, and other applications.
• Visualization and analysis of big data sets.