HPC competencies are rarely acquired through formal education alone. Instead, researchers typically build their expertise gradually while working on their own projects, by solving technical problems, consulting various forms of soft- and hardware documentation, exchanging ideas with other colleagues, participating workshop formats, using online tutorials or simply through experimenting with software and learning from trial and error. Over time, this process results in highly specialized knowledge that is closely connected to discipline-specific research questions, software environments, and computational methods.
However, much of this knowledge remains personal and project specific. Solutions to recurring problems, successful workflows, software configurations or methodological insights often stay within individual research groups and are rarely documented in a way that allows other to benefit from them. As a consequence, new HPC users frequently face the same learning barriers and invest considerable time in solving problems that have already been addressed elsewhere.
From an educational perspective, sustainable competence development therefore depends not only on providing learning materials but also on creating opportunities for researchers to share, document and continuously refine their practical knowledge within the HPC community. For hpc.bw that means working towards a mentality best described as knowledge transfer becoming a collaborative process rather than an individual achievement.
To support this idea, the HPC Portal has been designed as a collaborative platform for community-driven learning resources. Members of the HPC community can contribute documentation, tutorials, software-specific guides, best practices, project reports and self-study materials, allowing valuable experience to become accessible far beyond individual research projects.
To make contributing as easy as possible, we have also created dedicated documentation pages explaining the available contribution formats, the submission workflow and practical examples:
To make contributions even easier for you, we are here to provide hands-on support and help you transfer your practical insights and expertise into fully developed learning materials: [email protected].