{"id":518,"date":"2016-02-09T03:22:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T03:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aciref.rc.fas.harvard.edu\/?p=518"},"modified":"2016-02-09T03:22:22","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T03:22:22","slug":"building-a-two-hour-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/?p=518","title":{"rendered":"Building a two hour workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hello, My name is Erin Shaw and I have been serving as an ACI-REF for almost three months at USC\u2019s Center for High-Performance Computing (HPC). I have been focusing on outreach and as a result we will be collaborating with a group that provides an HPC\u00a0service to the medical research community on USC’s health sciences campus across town. They have\u00a0access to a mailing list and workshop space and have asked us to give a three-hour brand-new-user workshop. I expect this will result in about two hours of hands-on training.<\/p>\n

On the surface it seems easy \u2014 novice material, some of it well-covered online, super-smart population. However, we currently hold introductory workshops on Linux and HPC that run two hours each, and there seems to be barely enough time to scratch the surface of either given the workshop format. To make matters more challenging, we\u2019ve been told to expect 80 participants. For comparison, our regular workshop attendance is around 20 and participants already have (and have tested) HPC accounts.\u00a0 So how do we create a tutorial that will give complete novices an authentic hands-on experience and leave them feeling optimistic about high-performance computing?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with outcomes. They are basic: At the end of the workshop, participants will Understand why\/when to use HPC<\/em>; Learn about\u00a0USC’s HPC cluster<\/em>; Connect to and\u00a0<\/em>transfer files to our HPC network<\/em>; Edit a file;\u00a0<\/em>and Run a file on the cluster<\/em>. But to make these happen, users \u2014 mainly graduate students and a small number of faculty and staff \u2014 who have never before seen a command line and may not even have an account, are going to have to learn Linux and understand at least a little about scheduling.<\/p>\n

TACC has a good 90-miute new-user training video<\/a>\u00a0for XSEDE that contains some introductory slides that can be used together with our current materials. Since we have only two hours for a hands-on workshop, the most pressing question is how to streamline the busywork. Clearly, software like X-Win32 will have to be downloaded prior to the workshop, but setting up an sftp connection can be confusing, so we\u2019re looking at, what, 15 or 20 minutes to connect and transfer files? Linux is a much bigger and\u00a0more fundamental time sink so what gets taught will have to be strictly need-to-know. But, of course, there\u2019s a lot to need to know. And editing has to be easy so, Nano, then?<\/p>\n

Then there is the question of pedagogy: How can we elevate the tutorial so that the take-away is more than a sum of discrete steps? What\u2019s going to have someone leave the workshop thinking HPC is awesome and<\/em> easily learnable? We need a killer example to pull it together. I found a 2015 article<\/a>\u00a0about how Fujitsu is enabling customers to use their own data to make HPC technology more accessible, and like the idea of creating an example with a medical theme. I am sure my ACI-REF colleagues have had to re-work courses before, for different schedules and populations, and I would be interested to learn what worked and what didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello, My name is Erin Shaw and I have been serving as an ACI-REF for almost three months at USC\u2019s Center for High-Performance Computing (HPC). I have been focusing on outreach and as a result we will be collaborating with a group that provides an HPC\u00a0service to the medical research community on USC’s health sciences […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aciref.chpc.utah.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}