Training, Consulting, and Facilitation

Fast, expensive high performance computers don’t do a lot of good if researchers can’t use them effectively. Research Computing and Data staff are constantly working to:

  • write and update documentation,
  • install software (and help users learn to install their own),
  • research error messages,
  • conduct training workshops,
  • work with individuals or small groups to improve workflows,
  • facilitate use of federally-funded computing resources,

and other tasks critical to making the best use of available technology.

Multiple members of our staff are certified instructors for the Carpentries, have attended and/or contributed to virtual residency programs for researcher-facing staff, or have contributed to the NSF-funded ACI-REF Leading Practices of Facilitation guide. We have long-standing participation in research computing professional organizations and conferences, allowing us to draw on others’ experience to improve your research or academic work.

Read through the rest of this page or select an item from the table of contents to find out more about how we can help you achieve larger scales of research, improved reproducibility, or reduce bottlenecks and other hurdles.

Table of Contents

New User Training and Onboarding

Using a high performance computer is quite different than using a typical Windows, MacOS, or Linux desktop/laptop; or than using a server in a commercial cloud environment. And if you’ve used an HPC at a previous institution, you may not realze how much HPCs can differ from each other. We make the time to guide students, faculty, and staff through accessing the relevant HPC environment, moving data, finding available software, and running sample interactive or scheduled jobs to perform computational work. We can conduct this over Teams or in person (at our offices or at another location). Book an appointment at a time that’s convenient for you.

Help with Software Installation

Research and academic work often requires niche software that can be complicated to install. The installation instructions may be several years old, developed and tested in non-HPC environments, or assume that the user has full administrative control over the computer they’ll use.

We can help:

  • We’ve read a lot of error messages and translated a lot of hastily-written documentation into simple steps that work cleanly in our environment.
  • We can quickly install any of thousands of standard applications and libraries across the environment, reducing the need for duplicated installations across several users.
  • We can package software and all its dependencies into a container that’s almost entirely independent of our HPC environment.
  • And we have the tools and the skills to help you learn how to do all of these on your own, if that’s what’s best for you.

Request a new software installation or schedule an appointment and we’ll get things going for you.

Individual or Small Group Consulting

Some of our most impactful work has come from assisting researchers who were subject matter experts in their own domain, but whose computational needs had outgrown their available resources and experience. Though our staff have done quite a lot of engineering and data science over the years, we’re definitely not experts in every field. But by:

  • listening to researchers’ needs,
  • getting a high-level understanding of the work they’re doing,
  • making small changes to their workflows,
  • and sometimes by throwing a lot more computing hardware at the problem,

we’ve repeatedly been able to help those researchers complete orders of magnitude more computational work than they previously could. Make an appointment with us to discuss how we might be able to do the same for you.

Training Workshops

Some foundational skills for research computing are applicable to multiple disciplines, including

  • using a command-line environment
  • tracking changes to files with automated version control,
  • basic data analysis and automation in Python, R, or another programming language.

In other cases, you may want to get training for an entire class section, research team, or other group all at once.

We’ve led several training workshops over the last few years using lessons from the Software Carpentry organization. These workshops have been attended by students, faculty, and staff from multiple colleges at TN Tech, plus a few other universities. We’ve also conducted multiple training events during class sessions, tailored to those courses’ specific needs.

If you’re interested in attending an upcoming training workshop, or want to schedule one for your class or research group, contact us.