High Performance Computing Education: Current Challenges and Future Directions

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the ability to process data and perform complex calculations at extremely high speeds. Current HPC platforms can achieve calculations on the order of quadrillions of calculations per second, with quintillions on the horizon. The past three decades witnessed a vast increase in the use of HPC across different scientific, engineering, and business communities on problems such as sequencing the genome, predicting climate changes, designing modern aerodynamics, or establishing customer preferences. Although HPC has been well incorporated into science curricula such as bioinformatics, the same cannot be said for most computing programs. Computing educators are only now beginning to recognize the need for HPC Education (HPCEd).

Building on earlier work, this working group explored how HPCEd can make inroads into computing education, focusing on the undergraduate level. This paper presents the background of HPC and HPCEd, identifies several of the needed core HPC competencies for students, identifies the support needed by educators for HPCEd, and explores the symbiosis between HPCEd and computing education in contemporary areas such as artificial intelligence and data science, as well as how HPCEd can be applied to benefit diverse non-computing domains such as atmospheric science, biological sciences and critical infrastructure protection. Finally, the report makes several recommendations to improve and facilitate HPC education in the future.