HPC Remote Work: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

HPC world as well we are so glad to have you thank you it's good to be on absolutely so I think I was looking at this from a like a work from home perspective but John Hanks gnog brought up a fantastic point in the webinar channel that I hadn't thought of or put in mind did you read that for us I did that was an interesting take that I have not I mean truly when I saw the topic I was thinking work from home best practices things to keep yourself focused not as much about hardware and where you put it and how much it costs

so that's an interesting take that I want to dive into at some point but I also want to get into forest and what you're doing and how you're working and how it's working out yeah um I I guess I I'll just discuss kind of my experience with REM inbc absolutely so I consider myself essentially a professional remote worker uh I have a long history of doing uh things remote I went to uh graduated from online high school did plenty of online classes during the pandemic in college uh when I got out of school you of course everyone's always looking for these uh you know remote

jobs in HBC that are kind of traditionally remote um and you know just in general in kind of the tech sphere um that are traditionally remote meaning you know they are like essentially a permanently remote position not something that was you know mostly induced due to the pandemic um we here at ciq are all remote uh because we have such kind of a diverse group of people at the company that we are geographically spread out over a really really wide area and it would be essentially impossible for us to not all work remote um we've got um quite a few people on kind of uh

you know west coast of the US uh all kind of across uh you know the Western us Midwest Etc all over the US really um we got a lot of folks there we've got a lot of folks um kind of in the European sphere we've got a few folks in East Asia um so all in all we're a very global company uh for having you know just about 80 people or so um and so remote work ends up working out very very well kind of for ciq so when I um got on here I was really really pleased to find that remote work was kind

of the rule and mostly because like I said we're all geographically isolated not because of Any you know outside societal collapse or anything like that um but yeah remote work is great um I really find that the flexibility of it lends very well to these type of um just type of very fast moving uh technical type of positions um it's sometimes a little bit strange to not meet people for very long periods of time in person um but when you do finally get to meet people in person it's quite a lot of fun um I remember like at SC last year about 20 of us

uh that for the most part hadn't met each other before all got to kind of finally see each other in 3D um so yeah remote work uh is great it's like I said it's sometimes a little strange to just have you know everyone in a little box and then to finally be like oh these people are actually three-dimensional um but overall just the kind of flexibility that it gives you to bring together best of the best from around the world in one company um it ends up working very well for kind of those contributors as far as my part in it uh just to mention

I am in my motor home rolling around uh kind of doing a little bit of a national parks tour at the moment driving when I can and uh kind of just stay at uh random you know pullouts RV parks campsites stuff like that um so mot workor is great it it gives really really high flexibility to be able to like I said kind of work when um you're stopped and uh be still incredibly consistently productive at that while seeing you know all these beautiful things and stuff like that so I know we have uh like I said a number of other people at the company

that kind of at least a couple others that you know move around quite a bit and are you know digital Nomads um but just in general uh remote work works really really well for our company because we get to bring in uh you know our best of the best from all over um and everyone kind of has the flexibility to um work best with each other as kind of their schedule and their time zone Etc FS so Forest I will tell you the first job that I got where I was working remote was in 2006 when I went to be a lenux admin and be

in Consulting and it was very odd I met my manager on the first day of of that job and he told me if you don't hear from me you're doing great I didn't see him or hear from him for a year came back through was a very interesting job it was fun yeah it is there's a lot you should take into consideration I know pandemic kind of pushed people into it but from my perspective and and working with a lot of people that work remotely the first thing is you have to know yourself because it is very easy to get distracted at home and if

you don't find that or know that about yourself you will find out the wrong way by not getting things done so for me when I started I always thought oh it'd be really cool to be able to work and sit in front of the team TV at the same time that that didn't work for me so I had to find a space very specifically away from Tri that too it's not good for your back it's not good for your neck it's not good for your productivity like it's awful so yes having a space dedicate must have your space it's very important yes very important my

first recommendation Forest is a great space By the way thank you Zan yeah I I couldn't agree more having a dedicated Space is really nice um here in this thing I've got basically just one of my dinette tables set up as the dedicated um spot but back at home on the coast I've got uh I kind of had since when I started at CQ I had a few different kind of random places that I worked from uh I was living with parents for a little bit there for a second so I was in like a garden shed out back for a little while uh when

I got my place I was in um just basically like uh my guest bedroom for a while that type of thing um it's nice you know especially if you have pets and things like that to have them around and stuff but it can also be distracting so yes it is you know nice to have and just also for the factor of like not just the distraction but like the separation Factor so that you're not you know just drawn back to your laptop or to your workstation you know all evening because it just so happens to be there and you're you know thinking about what you've

got on my home office is a little walk uh to this like little detached shed that's on the back of my garage um that was essentially a whole bunch of like solvents uh like a solvent shed with just like a bunch of paints that type of stuff and it when I bought it um but I tore all that out put you know like insulation in wired electricity into it flooring all that type of thing and have like this dedicated office that I can actually walk out uh and go to during the day which is great for distractions it's great to you know I can go

back and you know make lunch in my kitchen but then head back you know to my office which is just distraction free um so yeah the dedicated space is is very very um important especially if you can make it so it's not one that you can just kind of naturally wander back to as you you know think about work again in the evening or whenever yeah very true it was like I think 8:00 pm last night and I was doing something I don't know if it like I don't know if I got a notification I don't remember what it was but I could hear my

son like in the background yelling at me Mom what are you doing you know and I was like I working so yeah some sometimes it's it's helpful again to have the boundary of like this is work time and the boundary of not work time power that was the first thing I found is it was so easy to continue to work because I wasn't driving somewhere so you take that two hours of commute out already you're looking at 10 hours pretty easy then I would eat lunch at my desk so you're adding another hour and then I would just keep going from a consultative standpoint it

made sense because the more you worked the more you got paid PA so it worked really well I could work 15 16 hours a day and it worked out great but it does burn you out and you have to find a way to walk away so that was my question to Rose and to Forest what do you do to force yourself or how do you force yourself to walk away is there anything in particular you Rose I know this is really a topic that you love so what do you do Oh you mean like meditation yes yeah meditation focusing getting away yeah mental health you

know you you kind of like touched on it in the beginning like you have to know yourself right and like the way that I like to work might not be the way that other everybody else likes to work as well like for me and I didn't know this until I got into it right until I started working remotely and working from home I I thought that I wasn't GNA like it because clearly I'm a chatty chatty kind of girl and a people person you know what I mean I'm like la la la like all over the place with people so I really I was very

nervous at first thinking that like my me mentally and emot tionally you know what I mean like I it just wouldn't it wouldn't be cool like I would get lonely and weird um I have not found that to be the case at all like I know that this kind of communication isn't you know quote the best like I'd rather see you in person and you know punch you in your arm if you say something weird you know but be constant come on what are you doing um but I have actually found that I like the freedom and the flexibility to do different things during the

day like again everyone's a little bit different like I do not have the ability to focus for you know three four five six hours in a row right like to me having the the breakup and then coming back and focusing for half hour an hour and then having 10 minutes where I go do something else that to me is a thousand times worth you know sending some emails especially because we are like across the world so to me I don't mind sending an email or doing something at 8:00 p.m.

because I've had like the space all day to not get burnt out right so like I never feel like oh my God I just I need a drink and watch TV like by the end of the day because like all day long I've been taking care of myself little by little and for me that is like the perfect way to work i' I'd much rather have the longer hours but it like spread out in between um but yeah I mean I will do a little plug there for some meditation practices and eating well like does make a difference right like going to bed on time

at a regular time and getting sleep and staying hydrated and um you know I do I I love meditation guided meditations they're just you know just like 10 15 minutes a day I usually do one at about 3 in the afternoon so if you see me not um online at that time for about 15 minutes that's why Rose is meditating um and it is it does it helps kind of it's kind of like having an afternoon cup of coffee it's very similar right where you get to reboot the mind and reboot the self for like you know to continue on so yeah that's that's my

strategies you fantastic yeah yeah thanks um as far as I go I just kind of make sure that I've got you know Hobbies around me and passions and things like that that I'm working on different projects that I'm just kind of in general keeping busy um at the moment you know obviously my big project has been rolling around as I've got like I think I just ticked over 5,000 miles in six weeks or so um and so you know it's just all about keeping yourself busy and just making sure that you're you know using the flexibility uh to your advantage and you know enjoying yourself

along the way to be frank uh it's um I have always been someone who kind of you know it's only been recently that I've started to learn a little bit more to um you know uh make sure to detach a little bit more and not just be you know kind of in you know the grind set all the time uh the grind I love it yeah but um yeah I the biggest thing for me is just making sure that I've got projects and uh passions and stuff like that that are fed by the flexibility and freedom that I have uh in this but you know

it's an incredible uh really it's quite incredible working remote and stuff like that I've got you know starlink and things like that so I was just joining everyone from like almost 12,000 feet on top of like America's highest pave Road the other day um and so it's it just comes down to making sure that you know even with stuff like that even if you're not um you know necessarily detaching from work just using kind of the remote aspect of it to make it novel and to keep things fresh um uh you know like that I mean what what can be you know working from you

know the highest pave Road in North America that type of thing is just like the fact that we even have the technology and capacity to do that is um is amazing so yeah just making sure that you know both you know entirely personally and just kind of in the context of where you're working from that type of thing that um you you're taking advantage of all the benefits of remote work so I'm gon to blow your mind Forest when I started working remote first of all it was difficult to get connectivity if you weren't at a physical place so that was fun and having having

DSL with one megabit was amazing like at home amazing first time I when I took that job I got a Blackberry and you could actually tether your laptop to your blackberry was really cool that was fun and then we actually got PCM CIA cards that were cellular that were 3G you could just slide in the side of your laptop and work moving it's the greatest thing ever so great now you have starlink you can do this live it's very different world and not that long ago I'm just on a on a hot spot right now but um yeah that's incredible to have been able to

have seen that transition because it's you know the remote work thing is is so much of it is fed by that ability to just be connected anywhere whether it's through a hotspot or like satellite internet or something like that um so that must have been incredible to have seen that switch over it it was fun to be able to work more there you go very cool I'm curious for those of you watching how do you guys deal with this what are you doing to work from home what makes it better what are the kind of Standards you set for yourself or do you see other

people doing or not doing well um I think going back to knowing yourself was the one thing I've seen cause the most problem for people not having a space um so yeah love to have your feedback before we dive into John's topic because that that one to me is interesting I had not thought of it in that way so throw some stuff out there I know art asked what are you doing about connectivity Force I think you kind of dove into that so outside of just being Tethered to something or using a Hotpot you mentioned a really cool technology that I think a lot of

people are curious about not everybody can get which one can now which one staring says a list of cool things um yeah connectivity yeah as far as like you know like the link and that type of thing goes uh that's what you were talking about right Zan yes absolutely yeah it's uh I you know there's you know all you know the usual kind of sphere of complaints about musk melon and his operation you know all aside that people tend to have I'm extremely pleased with how well the technology Works um I've got like a backpack from them as well that I can put like the

dish and the cable and everything like that into so that when I go Haul It Up on the Roof like one time like the first time I ever took this thing out I you know three-and climbed the ladder with the you know antenna pole in the other hand I did that once up once down and never did that again yeah I ain't afraid to get up on a ladder but there are certain things that you know you just I'm not going to chance with how many times I'm up and down so I got you know like a backpack from them that you can fit everything

into so I can just put that on hop up on the roof deploy the starlink I uh probably look fairly amusing hiking back down the with the big old pack with like this cable trailing out of it I imagine it looks vaguely like like a space suit almost with like the tether going back to the space station um I just run the cable back up through like the little battery compartment which has got a hole in the bottom of it um and just back up through like this little lid that's underneath my step that you access those through um right back up into the router

uh Power has been a little bit challenging uh just because I found that that you know my my totally waterproof whatever nature can throw at it solar panel died on me with the first rain in gardier Montana outside of Yellowstone um my Outlets don't work uh without Shore power or Genet power and I need that for the starlink um so I've been using like the Verizon hotspot that's actually what I'm on right now and it works really really well um I use that as kind of stop Gap uh if I don't want to go deploy the like the starlink up or something like that uh

but yeah overall I my speed that I usually get is like 150 megabits per second down uh seriously and then like 10 fastic it's just ridiculous it's and that's from anywhere I mean I was in the middle of Yellowstone um with just kind of a vague Northern you need mostly a northern sky view with a with only just like a vague one of those and um I was able to get it set up with just few enough obstructions that it uh I mean I was on you know my calls weren't dropping I wasn't having any issues it was it was fairly impressive so yeah the

starlink is is pretty incredible technology so far I've remote worked from uh Glacier Yellowstone Grand Teton and Rocky Mountain National Parks on it um and I mean it as long as you've got a view of the sky and power for it you can basically take that thing anywhere and uh go pitch it up on the roof so it's it is definitely the way to go for people out on the road people ask me about it all the time like I'll be up there putting it up and people will oh what's that antenna for what type of speed you get off of that that type so

I um I highly recommend that for fellow remote workers as a solution that's fantastic you do some comments here Dave God love thanks for watching manam so before working from home became mainstream people used to be jealous and tell me I was lucky to work from home I used to spin it around and ask ask how they would like to live at work it's a very good point it's a very good point you never leave and that's why people end up working far more I me I know a lot of people who will work 15 16 hours a day because they work from home so

there's that interesting separation I know Dave was doing that too Arthur tide hey manam would you say all in that it's more or less expensive to be mobile as compared to being stationary less expensive yeah digital nomading is a very interesting life um I wait is this is this an official term did you just make that up or is that is that a thing digital Nomad is a thing you can go yeah you can Google that one and that you'll find some other folks around about um but yeah that I mean that's what they call it digital Nomad type stuff um overall I would say

it kind of just depends upon how you're doing it um you know when you're stationary uh I'm GNA take this from two angles if you're stationary you know renting something like that like you're not moving digital Nomad life you know that's kind of a crapshoot it depends upon you know kind of uh are you living in Manhattan yeah basically yeah type of thing um as far as like in my experience um this is pretty inexpensive expensive living overall um being it's certainly not much more uh expensive than being stationary and mostly just kind of comes down to how you're actually doing it like uh like

I said I have a classy motor home about 26 feet long uh 10 foot high actually 11 foot high and about 8 feet long so I have you know certain spaces that I can fit into certain spaces that I can't um you know I have to manage water you know tanks all that type of thing um so I have certain amenities that I have to find out on the route um RV parks and things like that if you're staying at those are very expensive um and if you're going to stay at those for say like a whole month you'd be paying you know like Manhattan

type rent overall like just in general because it's usually like 80 to 150 bucks a night for that type of thing um so overall you're going to end up with like Manhattan style rent if you're staying at like RV parks all the time but if you're doing like what I've been doing which is a lot of just like boondocking dry camping at like uh National Park Service campgrounds or wherever I've like I said been boondocking a lot so just like driving up random Forest Service Roads and parking for the night and just sleeping there um pullouts along highways rest stops hold on a second sorry

my slack is distracting me um yes just pull outs along highways rest stops all that type of thing um now they've moved how you can oh yeah they rid all slack slack okay well I have to that just a second never mind apologies everyone good luck yeah um like I said I've been doing a lot of just like staying in random places dry camping um and that is really inexpensive overall um if you were to just like just kind of like what I've been doing just like I said sleep at pullouts rest stops that type of thing it it's fairly affordable overall uh the most

expensive expense is gas uh because this motor uh you know 12,000 13,000 gross vehicle weight operates best with you know 91 octane uh so it tends to you know that I've been you know I've climbed from here to sea level basically like five or six or from like 8,000 feet to sea level a couple of times by now um kind of in total uh so overall like I said the biggest expense uh turns out to be like fuel um but if you're as far as like where you're staying at you can keep that pretty cheap with just like um rest stops campsites that type of

thing it does get tiring after a while constantly kind of moving around and always trying to have to find somewhere um but overall it's uh it's definitely not uh like a much more massive expense compared to being stationary it's interesting because I know working from home saved me a fortune on gas and toll fees between two people it is it's like getting a race it's fantastic so beyond that now let's talk about what Chris knog brought up and from a perspective I hadn't thought about it so so John brought up having Hardware in a Colo and not not necessarily working from home but working remote

from where the HPC infrastructure is and the the things that you don't think about of the cost that you could pay a vendor for a canned solution and the support and smart hands that they provide verse architecting something that could deal with some failures and having a regular routine of someone actually traveling there and actually replacing the disc so having it notify or maybe not notify and I think that was part of the problem is not necessarily knowing when things fail but having a routine of when somebody goes and takes care of that and the other things that they can accomplish as well that kind

of drive that cost down and I was curious your thoughts on that Forest since you've dealt with HBC and being remote um I was just parsing everything that John Hanks had said there uh could you just one more time Z the question yeah so I mean from his perspective having paid a vendor a lot of money for a very I mean a full solution but they provided the smart hands and everything else and the amount of time that it took to deal with a vendor get on calls work with them to actually get things replaced waiting for parts all of that type of work does

it really make sense to pay that higher premium in some cases verse building it yourself having a lower cost for a physical piece of infrastructure and having someone go out and check on it every now and then can can you save money that way and it's a really interesting and obviously it worked for him both ways but there is a benefit to paying attention to how much it would cost to build it yourself and then do your own care and feeding and I think it's something most people don't think about they just look at it as I'm gonna buy this expensive thing because it comes

with smart hands and support it's probably just going to be better for me in the long run it may not be the case and I just hadn't thought of it like that yeah one example that comes to my mind was a cluster that we built out at uh the Idaho National Lab when I was working for boy State prior to CQ that was like a 300 mile drive from us the site that our supercomputer was at we were in boisey you had to take the 84 like clear out to their complex usually had to stay in a hotel I think when they were putting together

one of it um our Chief's assment had spent like over a 100 days one year out in that area um I think I don't I think that was on that supercomputer but that might have been on different business overall um but just in general we kind of had a situation like this where we had a site that we had to put a supercomputer that was very very isolated from us and it took you know basically a day's drive to get there uh and what we found was that it was more economical for us to um have the vendor rack and stack the entire system and

have them come out um the most amusing issues we had with that were them sending stuff to like our procurement at University and stuff you know screwed up our addressing and we ended up with components showing up at like Central receiving at the University that then had to be like forwarded on 300 miles to the data center site uh in another instance they sent a whole bunch of stuff all individually packaged in boxes and there were like 500 boxes that showed up out at the data center site and they're like what are we supposed to do with all these like they individually packaged everything basically

um but we found overall in the end that ended up being more economical uh we to actually go out there and put that whole system together ourselves uh we definitely could have done it between the three or four of us that we had um but to actually go out there do all that take away all the user support time uh basically put all of us on a completely different assignment for at least a week um was just kind of almost like a downtime period that we couldn't really afford uh and so we ultimately in the end had the integrator put the or the like vendor

and everything put the together rack and stack it um we didn't end up having them manage it at all because it was at a site where we were um already kind of you know expecting manag it like I said it was at a National Lab site uh so in the end we kind of had considerations that led to us you know managing it ourselves just because at that point it was easier to get uh one of our people out there with access uh to that site and it would be like one of the the support people from the company am I dropping out can you

guys hear me nope you're good okay good um uh to actually have had to have gone and like remotely tried to walk somebody through the troubleshooting that we needed to do we definitely could have done it um but we just preferred to be Hands-On except for the initial install the whole thing this team we' uh they'd rack and stacked clusters before Etc um it just wasn't it wasn't necessary for us to put the whole thing together in the first place once we had like the diagrams and all that stuff we were able to support it um so overall uh my experience with this in the

end we went out there a couple different times um to do maintenance on it we worked great as a team got the thing fixed uh and in the end it was more worth it for us to just kind of pay to take the monotony out of the initial setup uh than it was in the end to deal with our highly specialized system um trying to you know kind of third party support it you know walking somebody through what we wanted to have them look at it like smart hands type thing um I don't I can't speak to like all the specific like the numbers of

the costing and everything like that uh because I wasn't terribly privy to it at the time um you know like the full economic models and stuff that they were looking at but I do know there were a lot of external benefits that uh ended up like I said playing out well for us when it was us able to actually go out there and um you know make the drive and we had to and we didn't have to go out there very often uh we had you know kind of a few folks out there that could like kind of help us with certain remote tasks like

you know the you know I will admit like the drive example we had someone who could have slid a drive out and put a new one back in out there if we wanted because we had like lab researchers and stuff also using this resource so we had people over there that were involved in managing it um but for the most part it was uh we only had to go out to the site just like you know once or twice a year to do maintenance once everything was all said and done there was like I said quite a while that um one of us had to

spend out there kind of I I thought that was on a past engagement though but I know that once once like I said we had the whole thing set up we only had to go out there um every once in a while so you can kind of have a happy medium if you've got you know competent people that it doesn't cost you a ton to have uh they can do like just small things like slip a new disc in uh that's very useful but there's a lot of benefits to um you know ultimately just costing out having your own team go out there work on

it Implement their own fixes uh that type of thing so I had worked with one customer that their vendors would not do anything unless one of us from the support was on site with them so it didn't make any sense for them to do that but then they wouldn't support it if they didn't actually put the drive in so we had to do all the work to prepare the machine to take get out of the array to give them the disc to pull out and then to uh Gary pointed out making sure that the the lights are the right color and not not having a

failed Drive have the same color light as an active drive so we actually did that a couple times we would have the vendor pull out the wrong drive after you had taken something else out of the array so I agree with you it's if you got to be there anyways might as well do it yourself but I can't tell you how many times we would walk through the data center after that down the other rows because we had probably 80 rows worth of gear and just start taking notes of Hardware lights that were on and just having to open ticket after ticket to bring people

out and then we have come meet them for every one of those so there's definitely a there's definitely a happy medium in a cost of we could have just done this ourselves first pay somebody for the very expensive infrastructure that we're have to be there to take care of anyway so again I had thought of it like this but it is something that should take into consideration how much are you willing to spend for someone else to do it ver how much you're going to have to do it anyway if you got to be there you might as well just do it so very interesting

persp really is Rose do you have any thoughts I was just thinking about the variety of people that uh you know reach out to us as someone well you know as a company well known in the HPC world for a variety of different um I don't know what the word is uh Services right products Services um everywhere from hey build this cluster for us I mean just like the the the software and or tell us what to do right so we've done that several times where they are the handson there doing stuff and we're telling them what to do and what to unplug and plug

together and you know that kind of thing and then we are kind of like you know creating the flow in internally with the software and the the different programs um and so that that's one model and then you know several people have reached out and said you know we're like we're not gonna have this you know sis admin person anymore like can you guys just do it you know and so there's an interesting balance of like you know people on the ground Hands-On because there still is Hardware to manage and to deal with and then like who is actually running the systems and and caring

for it um so yeah I guess I in my mind I'm just thinking about what the difference is there and as you guys are talking I'm I'm I'm kind of coming to to grips that there are Specialists who deal with just one or the other and then there are people who can really do both um and so Forest you're obviously a person who can do both but I'm not going to tell anybody that that's going to be our little secret because you're not allowed to ever leave I'm just throwing that out there okay good the other interesting for and I've talked about this quite quite

a lot is it's really hard to find HPC people right now it's really hard there just aren't a lot of them out there and that's one of the things that to R Ro's Point people have been asking us to come in and help to build the Clusters because there just aren't enough so if you're interested in HPC you should definitely take a look it's a great place to be or chime in on this I know you and I have talked about this a lot and we would love to see more universities with specific courses around getting people into HPC Administration yeah it's uh HPC is

a really really specialized type you know of Technology as opposed to let me back up it's a really specialized piece of technology but the other interesting thing about it is just how disproportionate the number of people in it are relative to like the size of deployments they're usually managing what do you find in HPC countless countless countless times over and over and over again at you know for example universities uh is that the entire HPC team that's managing this huge cluster that has usually dozens hundreds of nodes in it uh with probably I know we uh we were not like a massive HPC shop at

boy state but we did have a a fairly decent user base at about 500 people or so on our cluster just kind of in total um so I've lost my train of thought uh there's a disparity between like the number what they're yeah there's a huge disparity between that you know you look at like I said universities it's usually a very small team that's managing a very large amount of resources for a very large number of users um you look at uh you know um you know like National Lab spheres it's usually a small team of people that are there on the cluster you look

at like private Enterprise once again it's usually a small group of very specialized HPC people um that are managing the entire infrastructure HPC ends up with like gpus MPI stuff like that a lot of it is stuff that people are just never exposed to in you know Tech degree or in technology it really goes in depth um into like systems level stuff you know like I said with MPI and all that um so it really it just ends up being just in general for one a difficult place to get into just because not a lot of people even know that it exists I got into

HPC because um I was always kind of interested in supercomputers found out the university had one I emailed the research Computing team and was like do you have any positions available for students and they happen to have just posted one and so I got the job and I but I was the only student in the whole thing um you know budgets were tight it always is kind of you know um HPC you find is generally a little underfunded by it departments at places um so it was just me I mean I was the only student while I was there we had a few other admins

um so just in general not only is it um there's a huge need for people just in general kind of finding out that it even exists in the first place and you know getting into that type of thing can be difficult I know that uh one problem universities have is that they um a lot of the time lose their people upon graduation or a couple years afterwards or so to private Enterprise um because private Enterprise has a lot uh more like remote work opportunities salaries usually higher it's Etc um so specifically they have a lot of problems in that just because of the nature of

you know especially like Public Funding and that type of thing um but uh just in general um if you know that HPC exists there are resources out there I wish I had Allen Sill's website handy if it's still active where they have like all the HBC jobs aggregated um but it's really uh isn't he working on a a like like a a pathway I'll say for for people to kind of jump in knowing that they want to go into the HPC as as a as a profession because almost every single HPC professional that I have met is like oh I know it was weird it

just landed here yes he is I'm trying to find it for you real quick like it's kind of like a need right like there there's like a little Vortex that opens up and it kind of just like sucks whoever you know sucks you in whoever oh and it's that's so true rose you know that especially in Academia there's I couldn't tell you how many clusters out there are sitting in a closet at you know the engineering building at whatever University that some grad student ended up you know being the one that got handed the cluster by accident usually an accident on their part and uh

they're the ones that manage it I and seriously there are a number of really really competent HBC admins that just like that just the research group needed someone to manage the HPC cluster I stepped up I was B and told whatever and they end up eventually ending up in uh in HBC and a lot of times these are uh like domain scientists for example um that end up kind of joining us in this world and and on kind of the opposite thing a lot of us are like you know one8 one quarter or so domain scientists ourselves just by like the sheer virtue of like

all the different softwares science Etc that HBC supports um so it's really if you like learning new things if you like kind of constantly having interesting you know new challenges and stuff HBC is uh especially right now with containers and orchestration um and especially with what we're doing here at ciq around HBC and kind of our different software stacks and automation stacks and um you know uniting Enterprise and high performance Computing there has almost never been a better time to get into HPC um like I said everybody needs HPC so if you're in the know that everyone needs HPC um it's definitely something that uh

there is probably some willingness to help you pivot into there lots of willingness yes I did find Allen's site the hbc.com posted that out there there's there's a whole jobs link board it's there's a lot on aesome we'll definitely post that and it actually kind of brings up another um uh topic here about interns and internships and I know that I I mean that probably you know projects and jobs that HPC Doo it's going to talk a lot about that I know that it's a little bit challenging for us we've had a lot of really you know smart um curious like really wanting to do

it people and they're like are you guys you know accepting interns and we're like well not really we really want to but I don't know we're not quite there yet that it is it's it's quite um it's quite a lot right to really teach somebody what you have learned like what what is kind of your your thoughts around that Forest I mean as someone who's kind of you know now you have like both perspectives right like you were that curious student who just jumped in and now it's like I'm sure that you get it all the time too like dude Forest it's awesome I want

to work on your stuff like are you guys hiring do you take an intern like can I Shadow you um like what's kind of your your perspective on best next steps for people are like some of the challenges that you've seen um the best next steps are honestly just get involved with HBC if we're not looking for interns you know I hate to say this but you know there are definitely a lot of places that are like I said I got my start in HPC just by literally emailing the campus research Computing team saying I'm super interested in HPC I'm really like looking for a

job in it um and that was you know kind of an internship type thing overall sometimes I was referred to as intern Etc sometime you know that kind of basically is you kind of the gist of what that was um so overall you know for people looking to I remember I was at uh the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium a couple of weeks after I graduated and I asked this question of kind of like the uh early career panel you know what what what advice do you have for new grads in the market right now in HPC and the gal basically said back you know

stay positive and keep trying it's just in general Tech is it can be a huge pain to like look for jobs and stuff in it there's a lot of you know like Cru and grifting out there online you can find of people you know I've applied to 500 jobs and you know people talking on Reddit and stuff like that yeah I generally find if you're especially like early career looking to get into this don't let that type of thing discourage you don't let requirements on jobs discourage you the position I had here um they said they wanted like someone a new C for all that

type of stuff I knew nothing about for Tran but I called them and was like Hey I I don't know anything about this stuff but I'm you know interested in this I'm doing this class etc etc you know how much on the job training are you guys willing to provide and they're like well it's you know that's what the whole job is about so come on in so ultimately it just comes down to showing that you've got passion and you've got interest in the actual underlying technology I love just seeing big supercomputers run like just for the sake of watching like huge architecture work on

something so It ultimately just comes down to you know working that passion and finding uh a place that is willing to Mentor you uh uh finding places and people that are willing to Mentor you tangibly like for example the chief CIS admin I worked with before this who taught me most of what I knew about HPC at that time because it was just her and I working on things for a long time uh so overall yeah if you're looking to get into HBC reach out to the research search Computing Department uh look for you know projects that are in kind of engineering spaces that might

need you know a computational Specialists to join on with them uh you know if you're graduating and you're just out of school like I said look for um just I mean there's all you know the big companies are all looking for interesting different types of people around HBC even just not like CIS admins um which is how I got my start but at this point you know I work as like a Solutions architect so even like all that different type of stuff that you might not find under you know the query high performance Computing but is still ultimately you know like you know building out

demos with AI at you know you know X big chip manufacturer or something like that um a lot of that a lot of those kind of tangibly related positions are also going to get you really close to HPC and get you great experience um so overall just keep your chin up and uh I would just say um like I said find those those places that are willing to give you the chance and that have a need for um fresh talent and passion I like that fresh talent and passion oh hey Arthur did ciq wrap your RG you know gas for PR I am definitely open

to corporate sponsorships if that is hilarious on the side like werewolf ascender terer and Rocky at the very least people would know that this is not like a Cruise America once we with all that at the very least people would uh be able to be sure that this is not a rental as people it's true get kind of crazy out on the roads they a lot of people are driven mad by the Mir sight of the cruise Americas out in Road War America these days um so yeah but I'm I'm definitely open to corporate sponsorships like I said 91 non-ethanol is is not cheap these

days it's not cheap that's awesome if you can find it all right well if our boss is watching you heard it here first um so another thing that I am always telling people is to jump into the open source communities I mean you know quite frankly HPC is just kind of like a hodge podge of a million different open source projects so um you know we support four of them now so we've got werewolf we've got uh Rocky um Apper and a sender and so all of the that information and of course then the links to get involved with the um open source projects you

know and there's a variety of different ways sometimes there's on oh and ALS um open Ella I'm going with Ella I'm just going with it I know you all like Ela but you know it's my world here so we know what you mean that works we know what you mean you know what you mean awesome um so yeah uh you know it it's easy and really beneficial to jump into those communication those communities I mean there's all kinds of documentation and guidance there's meetups there's um you know the slack Channel and the mattermost and there's all these different ways in which people are getting together

and talking about problems and solutions and and and asking for help right I mean if you really want to like get noce you know volunteer to write some documentation for any open source project and you will be the star for sure and it's a great way to learn I mean if you're trying to write about it and you're having to learn it at the same time it's a great way to learn it's also a great way to learn is to go try to solve somebody else's problem dig in even if you can't at least you get to see the guts and see how it's put

together it's a fantastic way to get involved right exactly because just kind of like thinking about it like oh yeah that'd be cool is very different than like actually having a goal right it's like oh I'm going to do this for this reason and then like the motivation and the energy and the solutions just you know will will unfold for you awesome that was really fun you guys so we're going to be here next week same time same place we were always talking about cool stuff thank you for being remote thank you for working with us thank you for sharing your journey with us and

being an amazing HPC um professional for us so thanks for being here man appreciate it glad to be on thank you for us thanks for joining us from the middle of nowhere we appreciate middle of nowhere so make sure you like And subscribe and tune in next week and go to C iq.com we are happy to chat with you and answer any questions you might have thanks bye thanks [Music] everyone