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hpc-ch forum on User Workflows and Support
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Europe/Zurich
CB building (Aula)
CB building
Aula
Agroscope
Rte de la Tioleyre 4
1725 Posieux
Suisse
,
Description
Topic Description
As scientific computing services evolve, HPC centers are increasingly asked to support not only computational infrastructure, but also the diverse workflows, skills, and expectations of their users. Researchers may arrive with very different levels of experience, from first-time HPC users to advanced users developing complex, automated, and reproducible workflows.
Participants will discuss how HPC centers can better understand what users need, what they are actually doing, and how services can support them in ways that are useful for researchers and sustainable for institutions.
Key Questions
Reproducible Research
- How can HPC centers encourage users to adopt practices and tools that support reproducible research? Examples may include version control, containers, workflow managers, environment management, etc.
User Documentation and Collaborative Documentation
- How can user documentation be provided in a way that is sustainable for service providers and easy for users to find, understand, and apply?
- How can documentation help set appropriate expectations about the competencies required from users and the support provided?
User Support
- What support models work well for HPC users beyond traditional ticketing systems?
- Are centers experimenting with office hours, co-working sessions, workshops, user communities, or other formats?
- How can support models balance responsiveness, scalability, and user empowerment?
End-User Service Fulfilment
- How can centers simplify and improve processes such as resource allocation, account creation, access to software environments, and service requests?
- What role can automation, container images, predefined environments, accounting systems, and service catalogue items play?
- How can service fulfilment be made efficient for both users and providers?
Portfolio Management for End Users in Hybrid or Multi-Service Environments
- How can providers present a coherent service portfolio when users may need access to clusters, cloud resources, storage, applications, portals, or specialized platforms?
- How can complexity be abstracted away while still allowing services to be customized or adapted to specific scientific needs?
Training Course Design and Evolution
- How can training courses be designed to meet users at different levels of experience? Or should they? How do we design the appropriate portfolio of courses to offer?
- How can training evolve alongside changing services, tools, and scientific workflows?
Who Should Attend?
The forum is intended for professionals involved in HPC and scientific computing services, including HPC service providers, support teams, research IT groups, system administrators, research software engineers, trainers, service managers, and others interested in improving the user experience of scientific computing.
It is especially relevant for those looking to better understand their users, improve support and documentation, design effective training, and develop sustainable services that help researchers work efficiently and reproducibly.
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