EuroCC News - September

The Croatian Educational Landscape in the Fields of HPC, HPDA, and AI

During 2023 and early 2024, a study on the Educational Landscape in the fields of #HPC, #HPDA, and AI was conducted as part of the National Competence Centres Croatia in the framework of #EuroHPC Phase 2 (EuroCC 2) project. One of the project activities, involving five Croatian research and higher education institutions including the University Computing Centre of the University of Zagreb (#Srce) as the coordinator, is to identify competencies and needs for new educational content and training in the areas of High Performance Computing (HPC), High Performance Data Analysis (HPDA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology Osijek (FERIT) of the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek conducted a survey aimed at companies and institutions to determine competencies in the mentioned areas and to gather insights into the needs for new educational content in these areas. The questionnaire was completed by 50 participants from all over Croatia, of which 52% were from industry, 32% from higher education and research institutions, and the remaining 16% were public institutions.

Survey results generally show a greater demand for educational activities than offered, highlighting the importance and significance of the Croatian Center of Competence for HPC in organizing training activities, primarily for industry needs. While some industries provide training in certain fields, their subjects mainly seek educational activities. Similarly, research and educational institutions show demand for educational activities, whereas public institutions typically offer such activities to a limited extent, while also expressing a need for further development in this area.

In the questionnaire, each section began with a question about the importance of the specific area to the respondent’s business and a question about educational activities. Respondents could suggest an educational activity they would like to undertake or express a need for training on a particular topic. In the continuation of each section, questions on more specific topics within the area were asked in the same manner, covering a total of 36 such topics: 15 in the first section (HPC), 11 in the second section (HPDA), and 10 in the third section (AI).

Overall, there is significant interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with the highly requested topics “Deep learning frameworks,” “Modern programming languages for data science and machine learning,” and “Data clustering with complex patterns.” Participants also suggested the topic of “Large language models,” which was not originally included in the survey questions.

In the field of #HighPerformanceDataAnalytics, participants are most interested in “Real-time data stream processing,” “Big data analysis and data stream processing,” and “Introduction to Big data,” with interest also shown in “Quantum computing” education activities.

The third field is High Performance Computing, with a predominant interest in education about Croatian HPC infrastructure and resources (topics like “Croatian HPC infrastructure usage” and “Croatian HPC resources: Supek and Vrančić”), as well as “Real-time supercomputing.”

Across all areas, there are topics for which there is significant interest, but educational activities are not offered to a sufficient extent for topics such as HPDA co-processors and accelerators, computational chemistry, and “embedded supercomputing”.

The analysis of the collected data revealed a higher demand for educational activities in these areas than the supply, indicating the significance of the Croatian Competence Centre for HPC in organizing educational activities. Most educational activities can be conducted at research and educational institutions in collaboration with industry, while for some, such as quantum computing, activities can be held in collaboration with experts from national competence centers and centers of excellence beyond Croatian borders.

Given the expressed interest, particular attention will be given to activities related to the development and application of “Large language models”.

Source: https://www.eurocc-access.eu/