Democratising HPC Training: co-creating an Industrial HPC Nano Online Course

Abstract

Purpose: Disruptive technologies (AI, IoT, etc) unlock new frontiers of data-centric innovation. This increases the computational needs, pushing more and more companies into the HPC space. However, although HPC is a key tool for processing and analysing the constantly growing volume of data across numerous application areas many companies remain reluctant to use HPC and move their HPC workloads to the cloud, which may be attributed to the inadequate understanding about HPC and its potential benefits, cost, security and performance aspects. At the same time, existing HPC training, mainly focus on the research and academic community, thus creating a gap in the provision of industrial HPC training and addressing the supercomputing knowledge skills of enterprises. Methods: Towards this aim, this paper presents an example of “massively” co-created education and training HPC module, namely an HPC NOOC (Nano Open Online Course), targeting industrial learners. This open, agile co-creation approach incorporates key components of the European HPC ecosystem and beyond, aiming to offer a paradigm for success in the democratisation of HPC knowledge, and the co-creation of educational value aiming to reach a wide impact (i.e., educational, technological, innovation, economic impact, etc). Results: The proposed HPC NOOC has been designed in an agile format so as to enable its ongoing evolution and expansion across emerging themes and indicative success stories across Europe and the world. Conclusion: Acknowledging the importance of HPC as a strategic investment for Europe and the world, this paper, aims to contribute to the democratisation of HPC training for industry and narrowing the gap between HPC adoption for micro, small and medium sized enterprises is important in order to reap the benefits of HPC innovations.