Not only did the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory take home top honors at the 2024 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC24), but the lab’s computing staff also shared career advice and expertise with students eager to enter the world of supercomputing.
The conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, from Nov. 17 to 22, kicked off with an HPC Crash Course led by staff from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, home of the exascale-class Frontier supercomputer. The course was attended by a group of 70 students who were introduced to programming basics and got hands-on experience working with Frontier and Purdue University’s Anvil supercomputer.
Suzanne Parete-Koon leads the HPC Crash Course at SC24. Credit: Lillie Elliot, SC Photography
OLCF staff members included HPC engineers Suzanne Parete-Koon, Elijah MacCarthy, Michael Sandoval, and Subil Abraham; project specialist MacKenzie Boyd; and Chris Fuson, group leader for User Assistance. ORNL distinguished research scientist Trey White also assisted in the course. Members of the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing also cotaught the course and provided access to Anvil.
“Job demand is incredibly high for HPC professionals, and ORNL continues to be a world leader in the field,” said Parete-Koon.
“Crash courses are a great way to introduce Frontier and concepts in advanced computing to the next generation of scientific users and how they can use those concepts to benefit their science,” she added. “They’re also great ways to show them career paths that lead to the OLCF and data centers at other national labs, as well as advanced computing careers in academia and industry.”
HPC engineer Elijah MacCarthy helps student participants use the Frontier supercomputer during the hands-on coding session. Credit: Lillie Elliot, SC Photography
The course’s overview covered topics including hands-on introductions to HPC programming environments, parallel programming models, job schedulers, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Students were given HPC Crash Course certificates for completing self-guided coding challenges using Frontier and Anvil. The challenges were designed to emphasize student adaptability and demonstrate the portability of advanced programming models.
In collaboration with the SC24 Students@SC program and the IEEE Computer Society, OLCF staff had the chance to meet with high school students from Hancock County, Georgia, after interfacing with them earlier in the year during a virtual tour of the OLCF.
“It was great to be able to meet some of the students and teachers that we connected with virtually,” said Fuson. “Because of events like SC24 and the many other OLCF outreach activities we do throughout the year, it’s not surprising when we see people again later on either as users or as OLCF staff members who continue to pass on the legacy of excellence in HPC.”
The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
