Program Overview

This document describes the goals of the ESMF training program and the types of training offered.

Goals

• To train ESMF affiliates as needed through tutorials, workshops, and lectures.
• To ensure that those seeking ESMF training, either for a group or as an individual, can obtain information quickly and easily on how to do so.
• To anticipate training needs so that training is delivered at the appropriate time and with the appropriate content, and with a minimum of time and expense.
• To ensure consistency and quality of training by having the core team (or another trained instructor) provide a baseline level of instruction to people providing tutorials and other training classes using standardized materials.
• To consistently and formally evaluate tutorials and workshops so that they can be improved.
• To ensure that training materials developed by MIT and others are assimilated into the standardized training curriculum.
• To develop an approach for delivering customized and short-notice classes that still guarantees coordination and quality across the training program.
• To transfer the ability to give standardized training classes to affiliate groups.
• To make all of the ESMF training materials and archives, including codes, slides, evaluations, etc. available to ESMF affiliates.

Types of Students

In past training sessions the following types of students have often been present:

• Software developers who have been tasked with incorporating ESMF into a code, and desire a high level of technical detail. These developers usually have a good understanding of high performance computing.
• Scientists who would like to understand how ESMF works and may be using ESMF compliant codes, but are unlikely to implement ESMF in a code themselves.
• Program managers who would like to understand how ESMF might help them achieve their goals.

There are ESMF training materials that address the needs of each of these groups. The ESMF Core Team can customize a training session for a specific audience - one of the groups mentioned above, or other types of students (for example, graduate students unfamilar with parallel programming.)

Types of Training

Tutorials

Basic tutorials are either half-day and full-day introductions which can be lecture, interactive, or both. The interactive tutuorials contain a supplementary exercise for that allows beginners to create a basic ESMF component and application from a simple numerical code.

A more advanced level tutorial is currently under development. It will include the use of arrays, fields, and grids.

Lectures

Short lectures are also considered part of the training program.