The National Laboratory of High Performance Computing (NLHPC), our partner from Chile, was the responsible for the first school of HPC Administrators in Latin America and Caribe. RISC2, in a joint effort with the EU-CELAC ResInfra, supported the travel costs of 6 engineers to participate in the school, which took place between October 17 and 28, 2022, in Santiago de Chile.
This school aimed to train HPC sysadmins with the latest technologies in supercomputing in a two-week training program, and discussed different topics, such as compilations, visualization and monitoring tools, networking, security tools, and installation, configuration and use of SLURM and EasyBuild, among many others.
According to Ginés Guerrero, the Executive Director of the NLHPC and one of the organizers of this training, “the NLHPC team wanted to pass on the knowledge gained for more than a decade to other administrators, so they can benefit from our experience. This has involved a great effort by a team of 7 engineers, putting aside all their tasks for several weeks to prepare an intensive 64-hour school from scratch. In addition, this process has been tailor-made, since the students indicated their own interests through a form.”
In total, the event had 8 participants from various countries: 2 from Mexico, 3 from Colombia, 2 from Chile, and 1 from Peru, leveraging the international networking opportunities and promoting closer relations between the administrators of various supercomputing centers in Latin America, the main goal of the RISC2 project. A team of 7 engineers (Guinés Guerrero, Pedro Schürmann, Eugenio Guerra, Pablo Flores, Ángelo Guajardo, Esteban Osorio, and José Morales) from NLHPC was responsible for delivering all the 35 lectures.