Many organizations abruptly transitioned from a primarily on-site to a primarily remote work experience last spring. However, organizations still have training needs that were once largely accomplished through in-person events such as workshops, hackathons, and tutorials. This panel will share what they learned during the past year in their efforts to bring more virtualization to what historically has worked for in-person training events. What worked well? What did not work? This panel will share their insights about lessons learned over the past year and how those experiences will inform plans moving forward when organizations can safely offer in-person training again.
Panelists
- Kelly Barnes (The Carpentries)
- Helen He (NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
- Julia Levites (Nvidia Corporation)
- Thomas Papatheodore (OLCF, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Moderators
- Ashley Barker (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
- Osni Marques (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Panelist Bios
Kelly Barnes is the Deputy Director of Instructor Training with The Carpentries. The Carpentries is a non-profit organization that teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. Our Instructor Training Program trains people in evidence-based pedagogy rooted in educational research and cognitive science and certifies them to teach Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry workshops. In her role, Kelly trains Instructors, leads the Instructor Training assessment strategy, and works to streamline processes and workflows. She played a vital role in preparing Carpentries Instructors for our transition to online workshops in 2020. Kelly has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology, has taught several university psychology courses, and has over ten years of experience researching systemic inequalities, including discrimination, poverty, and housing disparity. Before coming to The Carpentries, she spent several years as a research and statistical analyst for the Government of Ontario.
Helen He is a High Performance Computing Consultant at NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She serves as the main user focus point of contact, among users, systems and vendors staff, for several NERSC flagship Cray systems deployed over the past 15 years. Helen specializes in the software programming environment, parallel programming models such as MPI and OpenMP, applications porting and benchmarking, and climate models. Helen is the NERSC training lead, coordinating training activities for users. She has presented tutorials at various NERSC events and at HPC venues including SC, XSEDE, IWOMP, and ECP. She has served on the Organizing Committees for many HPC conference series, such as Cray User Group (Program Chair), SC, HPCS, IXPUG, IWOMP/OpenMPCon, and IEEE Clusters. Helen has co-authored a book, “OpenMP Common Core: Making OpenMP Simple Again”, published in Nov 2019.
Tom Papatheodore is an HPC Engineer in the System Acceptance & User Environments group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). His work focuses on developing and running applications that test functionality and measure performance of new OLCF compute systems as part of the system acceptance team. He also leads the training program for OLCF’s pre-production compute systems, where he organizes training events intended to help users port and run applications on early test systems in preparation for upcoming OLCF systems such as Frontier. Tom received his PhD in computational astrophysics from the University of Tennessee in 2015 and has over 10 years of experience in HPC.
Moderator Bios
Ashley Barker is the Section Head for Operations at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) located at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). The Operations Section is responsible for facilitating access to OLCF resources, providing training, documentation, and technical support to users, collecting and reporting on user facility data, and acquainting the public with the work conducted at the OLCF through scientific highlights. The OLCF supports more than 1,200 users and 250 projects annually from a wide spectrum of science domains. Ashley served as the National Climate Research Center (NCRC) Project Director from 2014-2016. The NCRC project represents a partnership between NOAA and DOE and through this partnership, the NCRC team has delivered multiple computer systems to NOAA, allowing the agency to advance its climate modeling and improve our understanding of climate variability and change. Ashley is also currently involved in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) as the Control Account Manager (CAM) for training and productivity.
Osni Marques is a staff scientist at the Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Osni has worked with high-performance, software libraries and tools, that provide solutions to common and important computational problems and can simplify the development of engineering and scientific application codes. Osni has studied and implemented algorithms for the solution of problems in numerical linear algebra, in applications related to protein motions, acoustics problems in automobile design, structural analyses, inverse problems in geophysics applications, electronic properties of materials, and linear accelerator cavities. Osni is currently a member of the IDEAS Productivity Project (funded by DOE’s ECP) focusing on outreach activities, including the coordination of the HPC Best Practices Webinar Series.