NCSI: Researching More Effective Ways to Train Research and HPC Support Specialists

Status	Completed
Mentor Name	Asya Shklyar
Mentor's XSEDE Affiliation	Campus Champion
Mentor Has Been in XSEDE Community	1-2 years
Project Title	Researching More Effective Ways to Train Research and HPC Support Specialists
Summary	Pomona College already has an HPC Support position that is funded by Hahn grant. The goal is to attract undergraduate students from all disciplines, including humanities, to a typically technical job and train them in all aspects of the job with the goal of assessing the process through their experience. As a result they write blogs, develop their own research projects and form a much more informed opinion on how to approach the job market when the time comes. This is an extension of that effort.
Job Description	The student in this position will be responsible for absorbing all the XSEDE (and surrounding) terminology, making sense of it through the lens of their experience with HPC so far and venturing into other domains like developing Science Gateways. The position will involve shadowing senior staff, documentation, communications with internal and external contacts and helping develop HPC Training curriculum for potential use at the college and externally.
Computational Resources	Helping researchers navigate XSEDE using trial allocations and startup allocations when appropriate. Benchmarking and optimizing code and workflows if necessary.
Contribution to Community
Position Type	Learner
Training Plan	There is an established HPC Support group that utilizes a number of freely available resources provided by XSEDE and other public sources. We also use paid subscriptions when necessary (e.g. Linux Academy, Pluralsight, AWS/Azure/GCP-specific certification tracks etc)
Student Prerequisites/Conditions/Qualifications
Duration	Summer
Start Date	06/01/2019
End Date	08/15/2019