Workshop on Professional Development for University Research Computing Specialists

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This workshop intends to explore the training of the community of research computing staff typically serving at smaller universities. In general, the community of cyberinfrastructure processionals, which includes the targeted sub community, is trained in an ad-hoc fashion. There is a constant pull from industry to hire away such critical personnel, which specially impacts smaller institutions with staff and training issues. There are plans for recruitment from diverse backgrounds and institutions. This critical aspect of this workshop will address better participation and training of underserved community for this emerging profession. This is also expected to foster similar coordination networks and training activities. The workshop will be collocated at Super Computing conference (SC-16); thus is will impact and benefit from the SC attendees. Such training activities are aligned with the presidential NSCI initiative on workforce development of scientific workforce in high performance computing, and serve the NSF's mission in promoting preparedness to advance science. The workshop will seek to identify community needs and appropriate training material, creating a critical community network, and developing a roadmap for long term strategy. Most educational institutions have relatively small research computing support staff and typically recruit their new staff from their user community. These staff are given on-the-job training to learn the specialized skills of research computing. Because of the small staff size, however, the loss of a single individual makes a significant change on the workload of the remaining skilled individuals. There is rarely a local expert remaining with whom to apprentice, as small staffs limit skill redundancy options. This workshop will gather experts from across the US, representing leaders of research computing centers, system administrators, educational programs, and other national coordination activities related to research computing, and discuss possible methods of addressing this shortage of trained research computing professionals. One of the goals is also to prevent the sense of professional isolation so common among smaller research computing centers' staffs, particularly in times of travel restrictions.