Merge pull request #51 from hpc-carpentry/sc21-blog-post

Draft blog post.

Author: reid-a

_posts/2021/12/2021-12-09-sc21-summary.md

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+---
+layout: page
+title:  "The BoF at SC21"
+authors: ["Andrew Reid"]
+date: 2021-12-14
+time: "00:10:00"
+teaser: "We talked to the world, and it talked back!"
+tags: ["Community", "Lesson development"]
+---
+
+## The BoF at SC21
+
+The HPC Carpentry team hosted a "Birds of a Feather" session
+at the [SC21][sc21] conference.  This was a hybrid conference,
+and the BoF sessions were done via Zoom, with Q&A done via the
+Sli.do tool.  Andrew Reid was on-site and hosted the on-site
+portion from the podium, while Trevor Keller, Annajiat Alim
+Rasel, Alan O'Cais, and Wirawan Purwanto were on-line,
+monitoring the Zoom and Sli.do questions and keeping the
+session flowing for all participants.
+
+The primary purpose of this was to try to reconnect with the
+HPC user community, and gather feedback and guidance on how to
+prioritize our efforts moving forward. The BoF was a success
+on all counts: 20 people attended in-person in St. Louis, and
+40 people attended via Zoom, with good, sometimes vibrant
+participation from both "factions" 😇 in the Q&A.
+
+We imagine that the SC21 audience is probably somewhat more
+performance- and hardware-aware than the Carpentries community
+at large, and possibly also biased towards facility operators,
+rather than novice users.  The feedback we gained is clearly
+valuable;  nevertheless, we need to keep this intrinsic bias in
+mind while we evaluate and act on this input.
+
+There were a number of survey questions planned in advance,
+which were presented via the polling functionality in the
+Sli.do.  This information was captured and is available
+in the [coordination repo][coordrepo].
+The principal results are that attendees would like to see,
+in descending order of preference:
+Future lessons on containers;  Python and MPI;  Dask and
+Julia;  Ability to mix and match lesson content;
+Constructing half-day lessons that use the templating
+capability to adapting lessons to permanent on-premise
+facilities.
+
+After the planned polling questions were done, a more general
+discussion ensued, largely captured in a [CodiMD][bofcodi]
+document.
+
+A number of attendees were interested in how to give feedback
+on their experience with the lessons, and seemed uncertain what
+feedback we're looking for.  The answer is that we are mainly
+looking for actionable feedback¹ that helps improve the lessons
+for the community.  The main mechanism by which we imagine this
+happening is through instructor and learner comments via poll
+(to be written), Slack, and GitHub issues.  At the end of the
+lesson, following usual Carpentries practice, organizers
+should ask learners for positive and negative feedback, on
+green or red sticky notes, and conduct a post-workshop survey.
+This info, particularly the red stickies, is what we're
+looking for, and ideally would be translated into issues on
+the appropriate lesson repository.
+
+We will be digesting the feedback received over the next few
+weeks, and look forward to working through the [generated
+issues][milestone] over the coming months to ensure our
+lessons benefit from this excellent community participation.
+
+### Highlights
+
+- One way HPC Carpentry can add value, beyond the lessons
+  themselves, is as a clearing house for HPC educational
+  resources generally.
+- The lessons and resources we choose to focus on are a
+  signal to the community about our priorities, so we 
+  should take some care in selecting these.
+- MPI, implemented with low-level programming languages 
+  (C, C++, Fortran), is still the most commonly-used framework 
+  for parallel programming.  It's appropriate for 
+  HPC Carpentry to develop lessons that focus on this 
+  foundational material. 
+- New users are increasingly unfamiliar with the command line
+  and file system hierarchy. Extra instructional effort may be
+  needed to help bridge this gap, including the effort of 
+  developing GUI-focused lessons based on Open OnDemand 
+  or JupyterHub.
+- Some users still struggle with the difference in character
+  between distributed and shared HPC resources, and more familiar
+  laptop or workstation resources.  HPC is not just a big
+  laptop.
+- Interest in cloud-based HPC resources is surprisingly high, 
+  driven by people with possibly-transient HPC workloads but without
+  institutional HPC facilities.
+
+---
+
+1. "Actionable feedback" may seem flip, but we mean it
+   sincerely: comments that include some tangible suggestion
+   for improvement are tremendously helpful.
+
+<!-- links -->
+
+[sc21]: https://sc21.supercomputing.org/
+[coordrepo]: https://github.com/hpc-carpentry/coordination/tree/main/conferences/SC21
+[bofcodi]: https://codimd.carpentries.org/9-Y8OaVIT2qpb_P47TR7Lw
+[milestone]: https://github.com/hpc-carpentry/coordination/milestone/1