Today I met with the first class of young scientists and researchers to participate in the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. The trainees are now into week two of lectures and hands-on sessions aimed at teaching them how to program massively parallel supercomputers. I chaired the afternoon session on data visualization and analysis, complete with a set up success stories, taught by colleagues from ALCF, the University of Oregon/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Kitware, Inc.
Training course organizers tell me this is an enthusiastic and motivated group; many of the participants remain long after the lectures end to engage the speakers on topics ranging from the latest performance tools to debugging to data analysis. Last week the group got special access to Argonne’s leadership computing resources, including Mira. This week they got a similar opportunity to experiment with application runs on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s leadership system, Titan.
By funding this training course, the DOE is helping expand the user community of today’s high-end systems, but more importantly they are helping prepare a new generation of computer and computational scientists to keep our national priorities on track.