Blending talent and technology to solve the HPC skills shortage

High-performance computing (HPC) gives manufacturers, engineering companies and other commercial businesses the opportunity to drive through innovation, understand more complex issues, achieve more accurate and predictable outcomes and make product development faster and more efficient. All of this has the potential to translate to renewed economic recovery by showing a positive impact on GDP. So, the possible benefits HPC can deliver are clear. The issue is that commercial businesses face a range of challenges in their bid to achieve it.

Assessing the skills gap
One of the most urgent problems is the current global skills shortage in engineering in general but more particularly in the highly specialist area of HPC. The truth is that finding the expertise to advise, roll-out and manage HPC implementations remains a significant challenge in today’s marketplace.
“It’s not enough to keep building powerful supercomputers unless we have the brains,” says Stan Ahalt, a 20-year supercomputing veteran and the director of a supercomputing centre with its headquarters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Think of a supercomputer as a very fast racing engine. We need more drivers to use those engines.”
More often than not, the skills to support HPC are so sought after that companies are relying on expensive consultancy to hand-hold them through the various stages of implementation. The industry needs to help plug this skills gap to capture the best knowledge sets and connect the users with consultants out in the field.
In essence, what is required here to address the skills gap is a powerful combination of talent and technology.
Sourcing the talent
Part of the problem is educational. While the rapid growth of HPC in research and industry is increasing the demand for expertise, the decline in the numbers enrolling in computing and engineering courses is creating a shortfall. Recent analysis by the University and College Union showed that the number of computer science courses across the UK fell from 207 in 2006 to 169 in 2012. In addition, according to the Royal Society, there was a 60% decline in students achieving A-Level Computing.
The situation in engineering is even more serious. ‘Meeting the Challenge: Demand and Supply of Engineers in the UK’ , a recent report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers estimates the UK needs 31,100 new graduate engineers every year for the next five years to meet industry demand in 2017. At the moment just 12,000 engineering students graduate annually. That said, the picture is not all bleak. Many universities in the UK are now looking at developing courses that respond directly to the needs of industry. Also, there remains a rich source of people out there, even among non-technology graduates who, with the right training, have the potential to become excellent HPC consultants actively working to develop the technology within commercial businesses. The question is how can industry go about attracting and then developing this emerging talent? In our experience, technology businesses are increasingly challenging the traditional recruitment model for engineering and IT staff.
Instead of relying on recruiters, some are taking more of this work on themselves, building associate networks of HPC specialists to identify and develop the people with the right skills whether they contract them or employ them permanently. Others are working with research universities to provide post-grad and pre-grad education to introduce valuable skills to the market.
When they do engage with recruiters, technology companies should look to deal with specialised recruiters that are able to spend time with the company and identify exactly what it is looking for. That means they may only be able to deliver up two or three candidates for each available HPC spot but the company concerned has the peace of mind of knowing that those candidates really fit. From a management perspective, it saves a lot of time.
Increasingly, technology businesses can achieve benefits in these areas by leveraging referrals. The key here is that each company engages effectively with its own employees and networks. The other major trend in recruitment that helps technology companies source scarce HPC skills is the advent of the Internet as a means for professionals to advertise their experience and expertise to the marketplace. The success of LinkedIn as a source of online CVs illustrates this point well.

Finding a simpler solution
Of course technology can also play a key role in helping to plug the skills gap. To be successful in the future, HPC needs to move away from a focus on ‘closed-in’ proprietary architectures towards a more open standards–based approach, making it easier for less specialist staff to use systems and solutions. Currently HPC technology is still trying to catch up with the kind of standardisation seen elsewhere in the ICT space. To accelerate adoption and help to bridge the skills gap at the same time, vendors first need to make systems easy to understand and use. By doing so, they will help drive their customers to adopt scalable and flexible architectures and make the technology more accessible to their user base. Vendors can help streamline this process not only by implementing open, standards-based solutions, but by using simple commercial off-the-shelf technology (COTS).
Second, providers need to be prepared to work with their commercial customers to ensure that their software and applications are modified to be capable of leveraging the size and scale of computing systems that HPC typically has to support.

Computing power on demand
Running alongside these developments is the emergence of a completely new delivery model for HPC, which Bull has helped to pioneer known as HPC-on-Demand. This approach involves the solutions provider investing in infrastructure that gives prospective users the opportunity to buy access to that computing resource rather than having to make an upfront investment in complex IT hardware implementation.
HPC on demand addresses the major difficulty that many engineering companies have in managing their requirement for IT systems: their inability to accurately anticipate their future workload. In most cases there will be no predictable pattern of need. If a company implements HPC in a traditional way they typically run the risk of either having to overprovision or being limited in the design work they can do because they do not have sufficient equipment in place.
The best way to overcome this dilemma is to meet peak requirements at an on-demand level. By using this approach manufacturers and engineering companies no longer need worry about the complexities of running their own environment, the need for highly-skilled specialised teams or the negative impact this might have on profitability. Instead they can tap into the available computing capability across the web as and when needed.

The emergence of HPC on demand is also opening out the technology to a wider range of companies including many SMEs in the manufacturing and engineering spaces who have basic computing resources and a lack of relevant specialised IT skills. They cannot invest further and would rather seize the opportunity to outsource hardware and technical support so they can focus on their core business.
Freed from the shackles of technology that is hard to understand and difficult to leverage, such organisations now have freedom to innovate. With HPC on demand, they have no need for physical infrastructures and no more maintenance requirements, while still having access to high-performance tools for innovation.
Positive ProspectsThe Government’s decision to pump £145 million into supercomputing in the UK is to be applauded. It demonstrates a clear understanding of how developing this kind of technology can help drive future economic growth. However, money will not be sufficient in itself to drive the growth of the HPC sector. To truly deliver success and overcome the serious skills shortage the country is currently facing, we need a potent mix of talent and technology. If UK PLC is to benefit fully from the potential of this exciting new market, both of these key elements need to be properly harnessed, nurtured and developed.