HPC Certification Program
Activities in the PeCoH project
The idea to think about an HPC Certification Program came up in the PeCoH project. As first step an HPC Skill Tree was developed. The goal was to categorize HPC skills into a tree. Representing skills in a tree is a natural choice because skills build upon each other. Four main categories were defined:
- HPC knowledge
- use of an HPC enviroenment
- performance engineering
- software engineering
An interactive skill tree was devised that contains all topics that were considered to be relevant. For each skill it was specified to which kind of user it is relevant and a level of expertise was assigned. Three user roles were distiguished:
- tester (who executes programs)
- builder (who compiles programs)
- developer (programmer)
The levels of expertise are:
- basic
- intermediate
- expert
All this information is kept in an XML structure. It is described in deliverable 4.1 of the PeCoH project.
HPC Certification Forum (HPCCF)
As a spin-off from the PeCoH project the HPC Certification Forum was founded. The forum works on the establishment of real HPC certificates. The forum has used the PeCoH Skill Tree as a starting point and has extended it by two more main categories:
- administration
- big data analysis
HPCCF welcomes contribuitions, see: https://www.hpc-certification.org/participate.
The HPCCF skill tree is kept at: https://www.hpc-certification.org/wiki/skill-tree/.