Building Experience and Confidence in HPC Practitioners through the Project-Based, Hands-On Practical HPC Course

The MIT SuperCloud and Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center have been introducing High Performance Computing (HPC) to a new audience through the ”Practical High Performance Computing: Scaling Beyond your Laptop” class for the past four years. This informal class, open to the entire MIT community, introduces HPC, identifies canonical HPC workflows, and provides hands-on activities to explore the challenges encountered in the HPC environment. The students use their own research applications as project work to apply the class concepts to gain experience and confidence in using an HPC system and throughout the scaling process. Survey data collected before and after each class demonstrate that students feel they gain familiarity and experience in the concepts taught in the course and confidence in their own ability to apply those concepts.