Review of the Documentation Activities and Training for HPC at PNNL

Here at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) our Research Computing team manages a High-Performance Computing User Facility. Due to the large diversity of research topics at PNNL, we have hundreds of unique users every month, each of which bring their own specific expertise. With a high influx of new users, some having little to no background in HPC, it has become vital for us to provide proper documentation and training for the use of our HPC center. Given the nature of an HPC center as a shared resource, having an educated and well-informed user base is beneficial to all parties. In this paper, we will give a retrospective report focused on the last two years of documentation and training efforts. By investing in the content and infrastructure of our documentation and training, we were able to reduce the friction between our users and our systems. We believe lessons learned and successes found within this report can help guide other research and education institutions’ approach to user centric documentation and training.