Roles in the HPC Ecosystem

In our previous post, we discussed the different roles within a scientific collaboration. Here, we take a different view by describing the people surrounding HPC machines. We refer to this sociotechnical system as the HPC Ecosystem. The people using and supporting these machines fall into the following roles:

Domain Scientists

Domain scientists are researchers in specific areas of basic science, such as cosmology, microbial biology, material science, and climate science. Most domain scientists conduct their work as part of one or more scientific collaborations. One or more principal investigators (PI) lead the collaboration. As discussed in our previous post, team members often include senior scientists, mid-career scientists, and early-career postdocs and students. In order to answer fundamental science questions, they run codes written either by their scientific community or by their collaborators. The scale of the codes and/or the data associated with them require these to be run in computing environments larger than the typical workstation, such as in cloud, cluster, and HPC environments. Domain scientists are the primary users of the HPC system we studied.

Computer Engineers

Computer engineers are members of the scientific collaboration who help scientists run codes on the HPC system. This work may involve modifying existing software or ‘codes’ to utilize the systems, installing community codes, writing custom codes to aid in the running and analysis of scientific codes, and developing cyberinfrastructure to support the scientific workflows.

HPC Facility Staff

HPC staff is comprised of people in various roles surrounding the acquisition and support of HPC systems. This includes people who act as liaisons between the users of the system and the facility to understand users’ needs, people who manage the allocation of system resources among its users, and people who work directly with users to help them troubleshoot their system usage.

Future work will discuss the effects that are revealed when examining the interplay of the people within these roles and the systems.