With great pleasure we provide insights into the results of the questionnaire following our recent HSUper workshop on 28.09.2023. We received a total of 29 completed forms and we will use the results to expand our offerings in the HPC Portal and to improve future workshops.
In Figure 1, you can see the distribution of scientific disciplines among the 29 participants. This reveals a broad range of disciplines, each with a different focus. These include for example engineering with focus on structural optimization or geodesy, data science such as statistics as well as computer science, especially cloud computing and neural networks. Moreover, there were also participants from the social sciences such as political science, economics in relation to operational research as well as cognitive neuroscience.
The fact that the HSUper workshop addressed a heterogeneous target group was also evident in the evaluation of the questions about needs and requirements. In the course of this, we asked ‘What are the seminar topics that caught the greatest interest?’. Figure 2 shows clearly that the participants are as diverse as the needs that led to their participation in the workshop. The majority was interested in how to use module system, allocate nodes of HSUper interactively or by writing scripts as well as utilizing the parallel storage.
In preparation for potential further offerings of hpc.bw we also asked the participants if they are interested in additional topics related to HPC or supercomputing. Therefore, we categorized topics close to what we offered in the first workshop setup and also gave the opportunity to give individual answers. The heterogeneous responses which can be seen in Figure 3 can be clustered into the following three thematic blocks:
Finally, we were interested in the experience at the first HSUper workshop. For that, the participants of the questionnaire had a free text field for either positive or negative feedback. We received positive feedback, on the one hand, about the structure of the lectures, the tasks, the presentations and speakers. On the other hand, the vanue and the provided support were also positively emphasised. We also received negative feedback about the workshop overall being too long and having less time for the more complicated lectures in the end, comments on the seminar room and insufficient time for networking. This feedback is not only motivating, but also the foundation of our next HSUper workshops. That means that we will divide another workshop into two separate offers for beginners and advanced users to have more time for either group and create an offer that matches their needs and requirements. We will also plan some space for networking between both groups and rework our lectures. Learn more about the next HSUper workshops in the announcement here in the newsletter.