Making the magic happen with research data, software & infrastructure

The focus of this work package was to develop a framework for the HPC community to grow undergraduate and graduate students’ interest in pursuing a career in HPC.

Research projects often require technical specialists with expertise in data, software, and computing facilities to deliver, support and accelerate quality research. These specialists help to make the magic happen in research. This online event will enable you to explore the opportunities and career pathways in research data, research software, and research computing. In the morning session we will hear from leading researchers about how their research benefits from the input of RTPs and also from practitioners themselves about how they contribute to enhancing research outputs. In the afternoon session we will hear from leaders about the opportunities in their team and there will be informal networking sessions.

On Friday 18th February 2022 (from 10am - 3:30pm), we ran an additional online event – an HPC Careers Day webinar - to highlight both the wide range of research domains and industries currently using HPC, and the corresponding opportunities that are available, with the aim of reaching students who may not previously have considered HPC as a potential career path. The Careers Day was hosted on Zoom as an online event, with 11 speakers and 2 panel sessions, chaired by ARC Associate Directors. Speakers in the morning session talked of how they have used HPC in their research or other careers, and why it is an increasingly important resource. Speakers in the afternoon presented more detail on their careers in HPC, to demonstrate the opportunities in different sectors. Questions from attendees were collected using the Sli.do platform, and at the end of the morning and afternoon sessions the speaker panels (chaired by Prof. Serge Guillas, UCL Department of Statistical Science, and Prof. Timo Betcke, UCL Department of Mathematics) answered these. Sli.do was also used to survey participants on programming expertise; the feedback from this poll validated our decision to use Python for the cluster challenges, as this was by far the most commonly-used language. Feedback forms were sent to the attendees and are still being collected.

From Monday 7th - Wednesday 9th March, ARC ran an HPC Carpentry Workshop, providing additional dedicated places for registered participants of the cluster challenge (these UCL workshops run termly and are usually heavily oversubscribed). For those unable to attend the UCL HPC Carpentry Workshop, we sent out communications directing cluster challenge participants to suitable (self-paced) alternative resources.

Created a set of cluster challenges. These include taught elements (allowing novices to attempt the challenges with more confidence) and use Python to introduce parallel programming concepts, including: why parallel code is needed and the potential pitfalls, how performance is measured, vectorisation, multi-core parallelisation, and GPU acceleration

• Find out what these different roles involve and how they are essential for effective research
• Learn about the experiences and career pathways of colleagues
• Discover the focus of different teams/groups and network with potentially future colleagues!

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith from the University of Cambridge will chair the event and confirmed speakers include:

• Professor Neil Ferguson, Imperial College London
• Amy Strange, the Francis Crick Institute
• Professor Nicola Shelton, University College London
• Tom King, QMUL
• Dr Michael Ball, UKRI-BBSRC

This event is organised by Science and Engineering South, in collaboration with RSLondon and UCL eResearch Domain.