HPC Curriculum and Associated Ressources in the Academic Context

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of HPC curricula, infrastructure setup, and the importance of connecting academic HPC resources with research and industry needs to enhance education and practical applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive framework for establishing HPC curricula and infrastructures, emphasizing integration with research and industry for educational and practical benefits.

Findings

HPC curricula should integrate practical infrastructure and industry collaboration.

Effective HPC centers serve as social actors connecting academia, research, and industry.

Guidelines for setting up operational HPC infrastructures are proposed.

Abstract

Hardware support for high-performance computing (HPC) has so far been subject to significant advances. The pervasiveness of HPC systems, mainly made up with parallel computing units, makes it crucial to spread and vivify effective HPC curricula. Besides didactic considerations, it appears very important to implement HPC hardware infrastructures that will serves for practices, and also for scientific and industrial requests. The latter ensures a valuable connection with surrounding cutting-edge research activities in other topics ({\em life sciences, physics, data mining, applied mathematics, finance, quantitative economy, engineering sciences}, to name a few), and also with industrial entities and services providers from their requests related to HPC means and expertise. This aspect is very important as it makes an HPC Center becoming a social actor, while bringing real-life scenarios into the academic context. The current paper describes the major steps and objectives for a consistent HPC curriculum, with specific analyses of particular contexts; suggests how to technically set up operational HPC infrastructures; and discusses the connection with end-users, all these in both effective and prospective standpoints.