Instructor Notes
Before Teaching This Lesson
You are strongly advised to run through the lesson content prior to teaching the lesson to ensure that everything works as expected.
If you experience any issues, please open an issue in the lesson repository describing the problem and platform(s) affected. The lesson maintainers will aim to resolve the issue as soon as possible but we also welcome the opening of pull requests (linked to issues) that resolve anything that doesn’t work as expected with the lesson content.
Miscellaneous Tips
- Timing: This lesson fits well in a single day, running from 1000-1530 with 2 hours of breaks. There is plenty of leeway in the material for questions from attendees.
- Exercises: Some of the exercises at the start of the material work best in-person where people can get into small groups (max. 4 people) to discuss.
- Presentation slides: A set of Powerpoint presentation slides are provided as part of the materials. We have found that using these rather than the Carpentries template material leads to a better experience for learners.
- Reflection Exercise: At the beginning and end of the workshop, give participants time to reflect on what they want to get out of the workshop (at the beginning) and what they can apply to their work (at the end). Using the shared notes doc is a great way to do this and a good way to make sure that you’ve addressed specific concerns or goals of the participants.
Presentation slides
Learner Profiles and Pathways
In this section we provide some details of example learner profiles to consider when teaching or planning a lesson based around this material. As such, the information in this section is not designed to define fixed approaches and structures for teaching this material. It is instead aimed to provide ideas and inspiration and to encourage you to think about your audience when preparing to teach this material. The information here is based on both discussions about the intended audiences for this material and on direct experiences of instructors who have taught it at workshops following different technical pathways.
Learner profiles
We begin by providing some example learner profiles to highlight the potential target audience and the types of different research and technical backgrounds that you may find among learners engaging with this material. With these profiles, we aim to encourage you to think about the learners attending your workshop(s) and which episodes it may be most useful to teach.
Considering things from a higher level, we also highlight three core groups of learners, based on job roles, who you may find attending lessons covering this material. While recognising that there are likely to be many learners who don’t fit into one of the following groups, or who span more than one of them, we hope that highlighting these groups helps to provide an example of the different types of skills and expertise that learners engaging with this material may have:
- Researchers:
Jane is a chemistry researcher who uses computational modelling in their projects as well as conducting experiments in a laboratory. They would like to know how to measure their emissions from HPC system use to compare to emissions from the lab work. They also want to know how they can potentially improve their emissions efficiency on HPC systems and estimate emissions for future funding applications.
- RSEs:
Jian is a research software engineer working on a mature research software codebase that is widely used on HPC systems worldwide. He wants to be able to assess the emissions associted with the software use on different HPC architectures and in different locations to understand how these different aspects affect emissions reduction from using the software. He also wants to understand if he should focus on energy efficiency or performance efficiency to reduce emissions from using the software on HPC systems.
- Systems procurement teams:
Maria works for a funding body and is involved in procuring new HPC systems for use by academic researchers. She is keen to maximise the emissions efficiency of new HPC systems that she is involved in procuring. She wants to improve her understanding of carbon emissions arising from HPC systems and learn how HPC systems can be setup and run to reduce emissions.