HPC Education for Domain Scientists: An Indian Experience and Perspective

Abstract

We review the HPC training avenues for masters, Ph.D. students, postdocs and young faculty in Indian universities and research institutes. Their interest in HPC arises from their need to use it for research in their scientific domain having done some background courses in programming with Fortran/C/C++ and numerical methods. Very few Indian educational institutes offer a course/courses in parallel programming and the course is mostly offered in some of the high ranking engineering institutes. Even in the stream of Computer Science, the course if at all offered is an elective course. The non-Computer Science domain users that makeup as the majority of users of HPC in India do not possess sufficient background in Computer Science and gear up as HPC users mostly through self-study or short term training workshops that address their requirements. However, such training programmes are not a regular activity in India and cater to a broad audience with a varied level of aptitude in computing, programming, and simulation via mathematical modelling. In this paper, we discuss the current HPC education scenario and propose an education strategy to broaden the base of HPC users and to help researchers at all levels to effectively use HPC for their academic research and development work.