Twenty researchers representing each of the ALCF’s major allocation programs (INCITE, discretionary and Early Science Program) attended the ALCF’s Winter Workshop, held January 23-26 at Argonne National Laboratory.

“Our primary goal for our workshop attendees was for them to forge new relationships, or strengthen existing ones, with the ALCF catalysts and performance engineers who support their research here,” said Director of User Experience, Richard Coffey. To accomplish this, the workshop was structured to give researchers time to meet at length with ALCF staff members to discuss and plan for their unique project needs.

To accommodate the training needs of users at all levels, Day 1 of the Winter Workshop featured a basic “primer” of how to get started on INCITE systems, while Days 2-4 focused on specialized topics built from input provided by attendees via a survey at registration.

Workshop attendees also took advantage of time with representatives from TAU, HPCToolkit, GlobusOnline and others who presented details of their tools, then worked one-on-one with interested users.

Mission Accomplished

Among the accomplishments reported by users over the four-day event, many noted they had resolved compilation or build issues, run new codes or cases that they hadn’t run before and tried out helpful performance tools. Others made use of the workshop’s large system reservations and assistance from ALCF staff to increase or improve performance of their code, and to collect performance, scaling or benchmarking data.