Navigating the Frontier: Guidance for Emerging HPC Talent

guidance for emerging HPC talent I feel like we've we've had this conversation a few times in different ways but kind of the same topic but I feel like it hasn't changed I mean John you tell me it seems like it's still really difficult to find HPC Talent now I completely agree uh it's fastly evolving uh it's a very quick uh moving is you know kind of like trying to stamp a out a roach that's running across the kitchen floor I guess to put it nicely um and I think that HPC means so many different things to so many different people that finding the right fit

sometimes is quite uh difficult yes that was a really good visual of like a and then another one comes right and you're like man I know if there's one there's like 10,000 behind the wall ah oh man so just the skills that are desirable in a HPC administrator um just continues to expand so how many people like I mean can you tell us how big your environment is and how many many HPC um Engineers you have you know maintaining that environment uh well at uh our environment is rather small I would say that we probably have 100 servers that are in our Linux clusters and

we've divided up the responsibilities among five people uh because of the types of support that we do we have two people who are engaged engaged in desktop Linux support which is very important because in the Laboratories there are critical systems that are running Linux that are connected to Scientific instrumentation uh most of those are involved in cryoelectron microscopy which is something that's quite new uh also we've adopted a strategy of using data transfer nodes because many of the sequencers whether they're long read or short read sequencers are generating uh data faster than sometimes a commercial Network can take them up and reasonably write to storage

in a data center so we're using Linux to uh act as a data transfer node typically I've got one right behind my shoulder as a matter of fact ours happens to be a a a desktop server that we bought from a a well-known vendor and we put Rocky Linux on this device and use SMB because many of the devices have embedded windows so you know we're starting to get into someone who understands Linux someone who understands Windows understands the different protocols the more I talk you can see that the more kind of skills they get assumed in that kind of desktop person that we're looking

for uh storage we have 14 pedabytes of storage at in IHS so we have someone who's primarily dedicated to being a storage engineer and making that work uh the scientific software that we use sometimes has to be compiled uh or it comes from you know something uh like a uh a repository that's you know cray or biobank where people are downloading or installing software and we have someone doing that and then we have someone who's just a middle administrator because someone needs to rack and stack and put the uh uh instruments all together and connect the PCS to power so someone who doesn't mind getting

a little electrocuted some sometimes someone who who's pretty good with uh someone who's pretty good with cable ties and then of course we've tried to add some you know more technical sophistication to our clusters as they've grown zanen has worked with us talking about werewolf and Ascender to try to bring like I said that technical sophistication and management as we've grown so I've probably talked about five or six functional areas that many people probably be very comfortable in fitting in one of those but yet to work together like we do you have to have a very large uh kind of vocabulary or skill set so

you got to know a little bit about a lot sometimes um and that's what we do so I think five people for us and that's really kind of stressing us out a little bit so I maybe we'll kind of go around and and see what all of you guys have to say about this but from my understanding they um you know having an HPC track in you know college is neish so John what what led you to the HPC world were you kind of just kicked in there or how did this happen oh I got kicked somewhere to get into the HPC uh it's a

long story uh basically when I was at the university the the favorite um program in language was Pascal and maybe if you really knew what you were doing you might go to one of the special topic classes and see uh so things were quite different I learned in Fortran and the reason I even started programming uh I had an undergraduate degree in physics and if you wanted to do any type of number crunching you learned Fortran later I went and got a master's degree in atmospheric science and oddly if you wanted to get any uh data off instrument and be able to do any type

of analysis like a 4A transform you had to have some idea about how to make things talk via seral or some other type of connectivity so really uh my career kind of made me mesh well with computers on the desktop and these are you know the before like 286 386 microprocessor types of PCS and dos I was always very comfortable with command line and making things work and importing things over the serial bus um later uh I applied for a job at the National Institutes of environmental Sciences where I am now and one of the things I was quite good at doing are in connecting

instrumentation to computers so that we could ditch the paper print out and people wouldn't have to retype and one day I noticed that there was a very expensive computer sitting on someone's desk it was a uh SGI if people remember that great company oh yeah and uh I said wow that's nice look at that I haven't seen one of those in a long time and you know it was a a 30 to $60,000 and you know 1996 money which is a lot of dollars to pay for those types of systems and I told them because I like to read about computers have you ever consider

getting a bunch of old desktop computers 486 and putting them all together into this thing called a mosix cluster and uh they goes well gee that's sounds good so at night after work we would go out and scavenge old computers put them all together and we made a mosic cluster and it was called arach because there were eight members you know so creative with our names and it just grew from there and we you know began to start applying these kind of cluster Technologies to uh solving computational problems uh and at that time it was really the computational chemists which you know having a degree

physics I understood theoretically what they were doing but then with my practical knowledge of being able to basically plug things together it kind of you know was real nice we just kind of worked it all out and it just kind of Grew From there so it's kind of like you know for me I was in the right place at the right time um and right now if I were to talk to someone in in college what's the next big thing and you go well you know you got to be at the right place at the right time is not a very helpful comment that but

I think that when we're hearing things in my uh uh the questions I'm getting asked about AI what does that really mean what is a large language model what are the what are these things we're tring to do and I'm like well it's very difficult to understand how to work with those things and what it really means if you don't have a basic idea of some type of programming uh if you don't have an idea of some type of operating system logic Operating System Theory which is why I'm a really big proponent of Linux because it's not a black box it's kind of a an

open box where you can go and see what's going on and really get a very good understanding so if I had uh my advice with people would be to download some type of Linux and put it on your old laptop that you're getting ready to throw out and start playing absolutely and I think it's interesting because I was having this conversation with a colleague inside this morning or yesterday and we were talking about the skill set that HPC people have and where they came from and it seems like more times than not the people we talk to are like yourself where they have some sort

of scientific background to do their job they get forced to learn about HPC learn a programming language and then they kind of get sucked into this world and I know that's kind of what got some of the other people on here involved in this as well so I know Brian you're you're right next to me on the screen so you're that a so let's see my HPC Journey started off uh as an internship uh I interned at a children's hospital supporting uh genomics labs and uh Medical Imaging Labs as well uh so this is where I learned the ins and outs of you know just

on Prem HPC uh from there uh I joined a cloud HPC company kind of learned all the idiosyncrasies with running HPC in the cloud uh yeah and then uh you know switched up a few roles after that and you know here I am uh with a mix of on Prem and Cloud experience and yeah just helping customers uh get their workflows running getting them optimized and along and at the same time you know also learning about all domains of science whether it's like CAE genomics uh Medical Imaging semiconductor all of it and yeah I think learning these industries just kind of makes me like the

well-rounded HPC engineer possible I guess yeah Jonathan I think we we talk about this quite a bit and there are a lot of kids nowadays going through computer science degrees but they're going they go more Enterprise I feel like there's just not enough people that know that this is an option that's why there are definitely skill sets out there that can do this they just don't even know that this exists am I wrong yeah I so in terms of like if if this sounds interesting to you if you want to do like parallel computation or large compute computation that kind of thing like I'm more

and more of an opinion that it's all about finding people are who are doing it and just trying to find a way to be near them and doing stuff alongside or with or learn from what they're actively doing like trying to do like the the advice to just install Linux and use it is great because sometimes I forget that that's even the first barrier of just every everything is UNIX so figure that out and you can do a lot of that without needing a cluster obviously and and I did a little bit of that in undergrad one of my goals was to be able to

run Linux on my desktop by the time I graduated and so I had my desktop that was Windows but I had a laptop that was Linux and if I wanted to be mobile I had to learn how to do it on Linux so that was the way I I forced myself to do that and it was right at the birth of kind of Wireless networking and wireless networking was a terrible terrible experience on Linux at the time so there was a lot to learn um but like it it's so hard to learn things like this without a project or a goal and so like I

had an internship also and I learned a lot from that of just being in a place where they were doing all this stuff and being there being people across the hall or or in the next office that you could ask questions to and there were people doing like large Resource Management scheduling development for or you know writing a schuer writing a resource manager in Python so there was development work to learn and there was a big IBM blue jean P cluster that there you know no one had run before so there were people figuring that out and lots of questions to ask and lots of

mistakes to make and uh I don't know you just find people that are doing things that are interesting and figure out how to do it with them it's been the best thing that I've ever done I like that seek wise counsel right like go or just the peers that you want to have right like the the people that are doing what you want to do just go find those people and ask if you can do it too all right I'm coming over Jonathan I I don't know I I tell this story I I legitimately do not know if it is true so I I had

I had an internship like the the summer between my Junior and Senior year of college and I had it in my mind that I could get a job there after I graduated but I don't think I actually had any kind of a guarantee of a position I think I just showed up after college and was like Hey can can I have a job and just didn't leave until they gave me one and that apparently worked out well I didn't know I wasn't supposed to come back yeah I don't know how I got into the lab like it's a closed site I don't know how I

got uh on site but I just remember showing up in the office and being like hey we we had talked about maybe me having a job after I graduate like oh right um um and then something happened it's fantastic that's awesome one of my favorite jobs of course aside from this one um I went in for an interview and they you know responded back thank you but no thank you and I was like listen I'm going to work there I don't care what I have to do I will clean the toilets I will welcome people at the front desk I am going going to work

there and she was like okay what what are you going to say you really want to work here for five bucks there you go so I like that Jonathan just very determined gotta do sorry yeah you know I mean sometimes you just know where you're going and you go there and you know you figure it out Forest I think you're still on mute but I want to hear from you I kind of know how that is where you kind of know where you want to go and you end up figering it out over time do it kind of how I ended up in high performance

Computing um I just to share my story really quickly uh I started out uh at boy state in 2016 and only vaguely knew what a supercomputer was I'd heard about like the San Diego supercomputing Center I was like oh that sounds fascinating I wonder what that is I'd always had kind of an interest in Tech you know I tin it around with raspberry pies uh you know throughout my youth I was the you know CIS admin for the Minecraft server and things like that so I was always really interested and you know these types of operations Cloud type stuff I remember logging into the AWS

console for the first time ever um when I was at this job at CQ and I'm like oh wow this looks familiar stop start oh this is like 10 years ago like I said running the the server for everyone um so I've always really been interested in Tech but I didn't specifically go into college like thinking too hard about supercomputers just kind of generically computer science I'm kind of bounced around different Majors for a little bit um but always kind of had to focus on Computing and domain Sciences I ended up getting involved with a research project at boisey state that was this kind of

joint project between a research lab there and the company Micron which has the world headquarters in boyy SO they're really wired in they were doing like DNA memory so using you know DNA as computer memory and when I got on this project one of the first things they asked me was oh do you want an account on the C uh campus supercomputer like the campus supercomputer what now like oh yeah there's a supercomputer it's you know they the research Computing team runs it and we do all types of different computation on it you know if you're in CS and you're on this project it'll be

good for you to kind of get familiar with it there's a supercomputer so he got me an account and I was like wow this is incredible and I still remember thinking like oh I'm totally going to use this to accelerate my you know mathematical programming problems and things like that naive as I was not knowing that this is you know parallelization and there's a lot to it um but about a week and a half later you know boy I hadn't been able to get the thought of the supercomputer off my mind um I was working as an office assistant in like our master's uh program

for the school social work um just kind of random College job when I was just bored one day and decided Well you know maybe I'll just see if the research Computing team happens to have any positions available so I just wrote a quick email to the research Computing team's email said hey I'm super interested in supercomputing I just got an account on the cluster I'm wondering if you happen have any student positions in supercomputing and they emailed me right back and said oh surprise surprise what a coincidence we just posted this job application because our last student just graduated and we're finally getting around to

hiring one so he sent me the job app and it literally said posted a few seconds ago so Sublime was the timing on me pinging them um I applied I was super interested uh I got kind of freaked out by like the job requirements because they talked a bunch about like Fortran and c and stuff like that um which I knew a little bit of but you know Fortran that's that looks a little scary on a a thing to a you know second or third year CS student um but they wanted like a whole bunch of skills with different stuff finally I just called them

up at the suggestion of a friend and was like Hey you know I don't know any of the stuff but I'm super interested how much like training are you guys willing to do like oh we completely anticipate we'll have to train a student up make sure you apply we're super interested um I went in interviewed it was a lot of fun I was just super curious like about GPU procurement how they'd managed to like get their cluster outfitted all types of stuff um and I ended up getting the job so I started there and worked for about two and a half years on the R2

and Bora clusters at boisy State um it was just a blast uh I was the only students this admin I got a ton of great experience while I was in school there um got to go out to like the Ido National Lab all types of stuff it was a lot of fun um so that is a great way to get yourself into HPC is to get involved with the local research Computing team on campus because they probably have some type of student position for those that are interested um but yeah so worked out until I graduated uh the it was the middle of the co

so they weren't exactly doing a ton of hiring so I started looking um for positions elsewhere uh I ended up getting pinged by ciq got recruited here and I've been here ever since so it's uh a really really great world to be in you find that it's a very Niche community of people um as I was always told it's a very very small group so mistakes travel fast and uh it's yeah we're and it is it it really is there's only a few you know supercomputing sites everybody does kind of know everyone to a certain extent um but I just could not imagine a better

field for me to landed in in the end it is just incredible to watch these massive supercomputer deployments run you know thousands and thousands of machines in tandem uh and just it's it's an incredible field it's only growing we're only seeing more activity with AI gpus Things Are getting more sophisticated like John touched on things are only kind of diverging more and more into different Specialties within HPC I you know correct me I'm wrong but I think there was maybe a time you know 20 years ago where we you know it was a little bit less bifurcated but nowadays there's you like you said storage

admins you know networking admins for all these specialized networks um it's it really takes quite a team to run one of these super computers especially as they become less like a bunch of machines stacked together in more like a single cohesive industrial device it's it's a great field to be in right now and it's a great pivot you know like I said if you're in CS and you like you know systems Administration and stuff like that and you're maybe not as interested in like the software engineering side of that things or that thing it is a fantastic pivot that is a very unique form of

sis uh an in demand form of CIS ading to be a part of so if you want to specialize it's a great spot to specialize in and never a dull moment yeah oh for sure oh yeah I remember we I got I remember just within a couple months of getting there I was working on deploying like containers bringing that to our Tech I remember this memorable incident where I couldn't SSH to the cluster and I thought oh that's weird but in my inexperience didn't really think much of it something the chief or chief s admin pokes her head in and was like can you SSH

to the cluster right now like no I can't she's like oh we have a severe problem we have to go down there right now there was a power outage and stuff and um it was just great experience you know we spent eight or nine hours recovering from you know this power outage stuff just got to like I said go out and work in data centers at some of the labs and stuff like that doing maintenance um if you're looking for a way to get into HBC it I mean like I said two and a half years of experience coming out was hard to argue with

and it was a lot of fun so of course I love how you take a power outage is a fun experience cuz the two of those I've been through in a data center were not fun experiences for anybody they were awful it was one of those situations where for whatever reason things had been configured such that the UPS has stayed on but there was no backup power for the there's no backup generator you know for like the cooling so it's one of those things where it had to be shut down very rapidly if something like that happened so thankfully the other adment that was down

there had powered the whole thing down but we made some corrections to our backup procedures and stuff after that yeah good times always always learning and you know it was funny when you were telling your story for us and you were saying that you applied I saw John he was making some movements like yes come in you want in come on in I was like we'll take I could not contain my enthusiasm but I was like interviewing with them and stuff it was just and and they loved it I was told later that that was you know really you know my interest in it stuff

like that was really what kind of set me apart so it's it is a great field to be enthusiastic about if you're looking you know if you're in school and looking to specializ I know that you know that software engineering job market ain't getting any easier these days HBC is only growing just you know as Brian touched on in all ways there's Cloud people there's on Prem people um there's you know really a lot of kind of float right now and what exactly HPC is um massive Cloud deployments there's you can really kind of pick what you're most interested in and really specialize down in

it that's one of the things I I'm always telling people too because they ask me you know I mean not necessarily that we are an HPC place but obviously we do hire HPC Specialists to do incredible work like you guys do and people say well how you know how do I get a get a job there like what do I do like how do I make myself known and some of the suggestions I always give I mean we live in a day where you can do a lot of your own kind of like self Education and Research and with Google and with YouTube and a

lot of the software is open source right so just like you said like go you know go grab Linux put on your computer break it figure out what to do with it right like getting involved in some of the open source communi as well kind of introduces you to the people and to some of the software and some of the struggles that are going on and going to the conferences and stuff like that um so what are some suggestions that you would give maybe we'll just start with John uh for for kids that are kids and and grown-ups too you can change careers right that

are um wanting to to get involved uh great question um the majority of the people I run into of course are biologists or chemists who uh are coming from a university setting and I I think that you need to try to develop a mindset if there's something that you can go buy maybe there's something you can go and get for free uh and I think that as the economy is changing and uh you know that uh budgets are becoming tighter that looking at open- source type of software to accomplish what you need to accomplish might be a better fit for some people instead of trying

to use commercial software and I believe that Academia is probably one of the best places that always tries to get the value from those open-source pieces of software so I think that you know that's probably the best thing you can do is start looking at the r and the octave and uh the other things that are used to accomplish uh numerical uh and statistical calculations instead of some of the commercial packages that people use um just starting to think differently uh about what you're doing um I also think that uh learning how some type of markup language is probably a very good idea for people

because a markup language uh many people consider that these types of things are very important in what's called reproducible Computing that we want to use languages that allow for markup and allow us to to do reproduction across different types of platforms and Computing environments so those are interesting things to look into and you know a lot of the computer programming languages nowadays are much more accessible than they were when I was in college uh there was no python when I was in college there wasn't even Java Script when I was in college um I think that these are quite easy to learn nowadays and if

you can learn one then when you do start to move into areas such as if you're interested in web development or you're interested in even scientific Computing uh that learning these types of scripting languages right off are probably the best advice that I could give to someone and think about that and one of the things I like to do at home with Linux is uh being you know to have a degree in atmospheric science is I built a little weather station and it really taught me a lot of skills about how to load streaming data into a database or uh how to build a web

page and things like that that are you know not a static web page but a dynamic web page and these are little things that you can learn and teach yourself along the way certainly if you're interested in any of those kinds of things uh but one of the things I'll make a plugin is something that people have not considered that there are some non-technical jobs in HPC that are quite important important uh because project management is now a thing because as HPC changes and becomes more ubiquitous and useful in many different aspects of research and Academia that someone needs to start managing those projects too

so I think that the project management discipline is now merging into the kind of the HPC discipline where we need to think about how to manage things like projects and manage this like more like an asset rather than something that sits kind of cold Arc at a data center so those are kind of my thoughts about it not as streamlined kind of a more of a stream of Consciousness probably than something more cogent but I just feel that there's so many little areas it's hard to really know I I think it's really based on someone's interests I think you can always find a an HPC

component that touches an interest that people have if you just look a little bit John if I just jump yeah I just wanted to say um one thing to not about like even programming you know there's something for everyone in it even from like a software engineering standpoint if you live to solve really really difficult programming problems some of the most difficult in existence are making things like communicate back and forth in HPC and doing that type of parallel Computing programming so like C++ all that stuff is huge right now if you're in that um I also cannot I completely agree on the importance of

project management our director at boy State research Computing who is not one of our admins engineers what was like basically like ran or operations was absolutely crucial to keeping you know relationships between like public util like power utilities we worked with the National Lab straight when we were putting together Bora um she was absolutely critical to just just like I said project managing that entire thing while we were keeping you know the cluster online so yeah it's truly even non-technically there is something for everyone in HBC these are very very interesting project management problem s like I said to manage you know three different universties

needs a public power uity needs a national lab's needs all going into one cluster and figuring out how to balance all that these are just across the Spectrum hpcs fascinating problems to solve for people who like to deal with those type of challenging things thank you Forest Brian uh I think starting first picking an industry that you're interested in number one and then second uh I think the best place to start is probably in a support role and this is because you kind of get an understanding of your user and why you're doing what you're doing and then at the same time you get also

get to learn all the technical aspects of HPC and then from there you know if you're more of a people person then you can go into like a sales Solutions type of role but if you're not a people person you know you can dive deeper into the technical side so starting there kind of opens a lot of doors for you and it's and because of that it's probably a good starting Place Jonathan what would you tell I feel I missed the the context oh what would I tell my younger self would you tell your younger self knowing what you know now and even if it's

not getting to the same place like what would you have done differently or what would you have told yourself about all of this oh man I I have no idea I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out maybe just not to worry just sorry always be always be willing to take on you know to to to say yes I want to try that I want to do that and and to not worry that like if you don't know something that you can't figure it out like we were talking about programming a bit I I'm trying to get my children to to start dipping their

toe and programming because there's like a a a phase shift that happens when you stop seeing computers as a thing that exists and start seeing it as a tool that you can get to do stuff um and I think the same is true of problems when you see problems as Road roadblocks or when you see them as as you know something that you can figure out an opportunity to learn something that you you didn't know before and I don't know just just to keep moving forward into new things that you don't understand that's what I would tell my my younger self that's down sorry I

love I'm not the only one telling my kid they have to go learn programming yeah class last year it was pretty fun to watch the struggle in the beginning and then once it clicked yeah she loved it do you know the uh like the logo programming thing where it like move forward turn left turn right that kind of thing that the little turtle so there there is a library for that just built into python that I didn't know about and so I've got my kids doing that and on any of the computers we can just call up like import from turtle or whatever it's called

and then they can turn the turtle left to right and and draw lines which they they've enjoyed so far we'll see how far that goes it's very cool a lot you can do with that I remember programming mining Turtles to like do like little automated mining things in Minecraft and Lua and stuff way way back in the day so it's you're you've got them on the right track very cool I love forests way back in the day I love it back when I was a kid John what would you tell your your younger self um the side's investing in various other companies Now by crypto

yeah right um I I think I would tell my younger self uh that your career is going to be wide and varied and I I think that uh there is not you know when you get to be older there's always time to change and there's always people who are going to welcome you into their kind of fold I spent a long time working with the scientist I spent a long time working with HPC uh and I think that there have been some times in my career when I've said you know what I think I want a little bit of a change this interests me and

I think you know like the story that that farest told about his enthusiasm and I think that maintain try to maintain your level of enthusiasm about things is very important and making sure that you're interested and engaged in what you're doing is uh critically important and really uh much like other people I I think that uh you know there's a very good career to be found in HPC if that's what you're interested in and I feel that uh you know let's just um you know stay the course is what I would tell people you know I know that sounds kind of trite but it's true

yeah like it if you want it you can have it I think we have oh a nice oh it's not the one I thought it was look at that all right it's the same system uh but you know John was talking about there being people on the staff that have to be willing to be electrocuted and it made me wonder if I had pictures of this and I was very pleased actually asking a colleague of mine if he had him because I I didn't think I did but I found this um so this system had power supplies that would go dead had like I think

nine power supplies per rack and they discovered someone discovered that uh there was no way to turn one of these power supplies off you were just meant to rip them out live and they they saw that there was a big you know arc flash scorch mark inside the channel where the power supply had been so there it was identified by someone who cared about OSHA that this was an arc flash Hazard So what had become like a two-minute job of you know pull a spare take one out put one in this became a three-man operation where one of us had to to wear the bunny

suit and the face shield and all of this because from the aisle you can't see or you can't see where the person is doing the work uh from the breaker so you had to have someone Manning the breaker someone standing in between the two people to like see if someone's getting electrocuted and then signal the person at the breaker and then someone doing the work and so we'd save these up for about two weeks and then replace a bunch of them at once and uh so yeah being willing to get electrocuted can be part of your journey for sure love how looks this case yeah

looks like you're sticking a screwdriver into a key Keyhole I it I I don't remember I think they were just screwed in so we had to unscrew it to to pull it out oh it is the screw you're right but it looks like you should be sticking a key in there but you're trying to hotwire the server or electrocute yourself yeah okay who who has actually electrocuted themselves not working on computers no placing light fixtures recently I was recently to dig down because there was a really heavy dresser and there was a my light was plugged in and I was didn't realize that the switch

was on and I reached down there with scissors like a toal didn't even think boom anyway good times thanks for listening thanks for an exciting day yeah you know it was very exciting yes it was yes it was electri John's apparently done this too he raised his hand um you know elri well no a printer at work got me so there's some high voltage DC in there so you know that uh that was a little bit shocking to say the least I'm pleased to say I ran my own home data center wiring at one point successfully without getting shock good for you you know I

never work live so that was pretty fun and like 30 amp circuits stuff like that I've got my server rack on it good times I've never tried plugging a 110 server into a 220 allet either it's not a fun experience when they tell you the wrong thing and you do it then it starts to smoke in a data center pretty exciting supp power supply on it yes than very exciting okay so we one more question here guys and maybe we'll just kind of wrap up after that um I don't think we have too many questions we got a couple people watching though on the YouTube

so hello you guys David and Patrick and Jonathan nice to see you all kind of commenting in the chat on YouTube thank you um so guys navigating the 2024 job market we kind of talked a little bit about you know how you guys you know got in and some suggestions and tips and tricks and things like that so what is new about right now and how can you give some people some suggestions on how to navigate it it's all the AIML large language model stuff right and uh there's a lot to learn there but the cool thing is a lot of it's open source so

you can go run it you can get an instance in the cloud and be learning about it right now I I talk all the time about the value of the cloud being that it scales down more than up and you can go get a data center class GPU you know as long as there's one available right now you can go get an instance with that and run your model and that's really cool and then you can take that that skill into the market um that's what I would be doing that's awesome thank you Brian suggestion like Jonathan said uh so a lot of what Jonathan

said is kind of like the user side of IML but then you could also kind of look into the system side as well how these uh systems are built and if you're like a computer engineer you might even go as far as you know looking into uh a Semiconductor Company people who actually build the chips to actually run these computations uh so all of those areas uh I would I would recommend uh to be explored I think probably one thing sorry John just like slip in here too and I mean I feel like we like we've said it but maybe not like specifically is that

don't worry if you don't qualify for every single thing on whatever the job description is right like the desire the want the willingness to learn the self motivation is also very inspiring for people who are hiring and that's kind of what they're looking for right so even if you don't know everything you can learn it of course sorry John did I still hear thunder I would recommend to people if they do want some typee of more formal education that at least in North Carolina we have a very strong community college system uh that and I think that like I said programming languages are much more

accessible now to people and I think that uh many of the community colleges at least like I said in North Carolina their tuition rates are very low and picking up a class and meeting people have similar interests who may be in that industry that you care about would be a good way to to kind of get started and put your kind of you know gauge your interest in a very inexpensive and lowrisk way if that makes sense absolutely it does yeah yeah and also find if there are events either at that or or other institutions like I I lived 40 minutes from uh from champagne

or B in an Illinois and my whole life I did not know about NCSA or that they had anything there and I'm sure that they have either free or cheap events that you can just go to that are related to their scientific Computing stuff and just talk to the people there there will be venders there that are sponsoring there will be scientists there there will be admins there and just ask them about their what they're doing people in Academia love to talk about what they do and there's there's all kind of opportunity there to become a person with a face and an name uh to

them and all of them probably know somebody who's looking for someone to take a job in a position in that space very good B came up mute yeah just to say you know if you're out in the job market right now you out of school or something like that keep at it it's a tough time there's a lot of talent out there um but if you're in HBC and that's the tree you're barking up it's a fantastic career to get into right now you know not to brag too much I work remote I love my job I solve interesting problems um I absolutely love what

I do so if you're on the path into HPC it's uh keep at it and if you're not definitely consider it as a way forward as you know hinin said specialization is for insects um but in HBC you know when it comes to training and stuff like that you know you really should be able to you know wire an infinite band get a GPU working all that type of stuff um so a lot of these generic things places are especially if you're new are definitely willing to you know bring you up to speed on um and then you can worry about you know from there

kind of picking what you like most whether that's the software engineering and programing or parallel programming um networks storage Etc uh so it's yeah it's a fantastic career and a great way to stay relevant in the job market today I love how we started with insects and we ended with insects Rose close this out no Brian one more oh wait you're on mute oh I think I already went oh you did yeah you did wow I'm tripping I'm tring don't know where I am I can just sit here and talk to you guys forever and ever chilling okay I don't it's on Fast already I

didn't realize we were at this time yeah yeah yeah so you got I mean everybody John it's really nice meeting you I'm so glad that you showed up and you were here today please come back anytime the rest of you I'm going to see you later thank you everybody for watching and coming on if you have a topic of Interest please let us know you know it's here at ciq we do a variety of things HPC absolutely and we do other things too so we love to talk to you about our Enterprise Linux platform and automating and doing all kinds of cool stuff like that

so check us out at C iq.com fill out anything there it's going to come to us we're going to respond we want to chat with you we want to talk to you get into the HPC Computing world and we will see you around thank you so much for watching guys we'll see you next time thanks everybody thanks John really appreciate it well thank you take care [Music]