Today the TACC announced that the first High Performance Computing for Managers Institute will take place September 12-14 in Austin.
With course materials by TACC and the Numerical Algorithms Group, this three-day workshop is specifically tailored to managers and decision makers who are using, or considering using, HPC within their organizations. It is also applicable to those with a real opportunity to make this career step in the future.
The focus of HPC training has always been for programmers and users, and there are good reasons for that — an HPC system’s impact depends on the quality of simulations and analysis run on it,” said Lucas Wilson, director of Training and Professional Development in TACC’s User Services Group.
“But there is a tendency to forget the other side of the equation. Researchers cannot create impact using HPC if a sub-optimal system, or no system, is available. Our goal with this course is to offer insights to those providing HPC resources to help the managers determine how best to configure and operate HPC systems. TACC has offered a subset of this course in the past to our industrial partners, and this new partnership with NAG allows us to provide a more complete look at the process of planning for, acquiring and operating HPC services which will have the optimum research and business impact, building on the successful tutorials delivered by NAG at SC16 and at the Rice Oil & Gas HPC Conference,” Wilson said.
Topics covered will include strategic planning, technology options, procurement and deployment, people issues, total cost of ownership, performance measurement, and cost/benefit analysis of investing in HPC to support a company or institution’s R&D portfolio. A broad scope of HPC is covered from department scale clusters to the largest supercomputers, consideration of cloud, modeling and simulation to non-traditional use cases, and more. The training has been designed for industry attendees, although academic HPC managers will also find it valuable. TACC and NAG encourage attendees from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented communities.
We were urged to create unique training opportunity by several of TACC’s industry partners and NAG’s HPC consulting customers”, said Andrew Jones, vice president of Strategic HPC Consulting and Services at NAG.
Jones added: “HPC managers from industry have told us of their need to have an opportunity for their HPC systems and computational sciences staff to learn about the business processes required to deliver a successful HPC environment. They believe this course will be very valuable in developing future HPC leaders and improving the collaboration with the researchers they support.”
In 2017, TACC began offering seven different, week-long, topic-based Institutes to highlight different focus areas in advanced computing. These Institutes are: Parallel Programming Foundations; Data and Information Analytics; Visualizing and Interacting with Data; Designing and Administering Large-Scale Systems; Computational Techniques for Life Sciences; Computational Science in the Cloud; and TACC-NAG HPC for Managers.
