Abstract
At the “Kick Off” meeting for CompBioMed (compbiomed.eu), which was first funded in October 2016, I had no idea that one single sentence (“I wish I could teach this to medical students”) would lead to a dedicated program of work to engage the clinicians and biomedical researchers of the future with supercomputing. This program of work which, within the CompBiomed Centre of Excellence, we have been calling “the CompBioMed Education and Training Programme,” is a holistic endeavor that has been developed by and continues to be delivered with the expertise and support from experimental researchers, computer scientists, clinicians, HPC centers, and industrial partners within or associated with CompBioMed. The original description of the initial educational approach to training has previously been published (Townsend-Nicholson Interface Focus 10:20200003, 2020). In this chapter, I describe the refinements to the program and its delivery, emphasizing the highs and lows of delivering this program over the past 6 years. I conclude with suggestions for feasible measures that I believe will help overcome the barriers and challenges we have encountered in bringing a community of users with little familiarity of computing beyond the desktop to the petascale and beyond.
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References
Townsend-Nicholson A (2020) Educating and engaging new communities of practice with high performance computing through the integration of teaching and research. Interface Focus 10:20200003. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2020.0003
Townsend-Nicholson A, Gregory D, Hoti A, Merritt C, Franks S (2020) Demystifying the Dark Arts of HPC – Introducing biomedical researchers to supercomputers. https://sc20.supercomputing.org/proceedings/sotp/sotp_files/sotp104s2-file2.pdf
Poolman TM, Townsend-Nicholson A, Cain A (2022) Teaching genomics to life science undergraduates using cloud computing platforms with open datasets. Biochem Mol Biol Educ 50(5):446–449. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.21646
Acknowledgments
I would like to specifically thank Carlos Teijeiro Barjas, Marco Verdicchio, Gavin Pringle, Andrew Narracott, Guillaume Hautbergue, Alberto Marzo, Oscar Camara Rey, Mariano Vazquez and Peter Coveney for their advice, support and contributions to the development of this novel education and training programme. I am indebted to Dr Claire Ellul (Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, UCL) for generating the map shown in Figure 1, which was sourced from the European Commission, Eurostat (ESTAT) using the following sources of data: Euro Geographics, TurkStat and UN FAO. I am grateful to the European Commission (grants 675451 and 823712) and to EPSRC (EP/X019446/1 and EP/Y008731/1) for funding support.
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Townsend-Nicholson, A. (2024). Teaching Medical Students to Use Supercomputers: A Personal Reflection. In: Heifetz, A. (eds) High Performance Computing for Drug Discovery and Biomedicine. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2716. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3449-3_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3449-3_20
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