Fascinating, I’m working these days on projects having to do with RF 
propagation through the ionosphere, for which her papers are “seminal works”


From: John Hearns <hear...@googlemail.com>
Date: Friday, March 22, 2019 at 1:48 PM
To: Jim Lux <james.p....@jpl.nasa.gov>
Cc: Prentice Bisbal <pbis...@pppl.gov>, "beowulf@beowulf.org" 
<beowulf@beowulf.org>
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: Introduction and question

I matriculated (enrolled) at Glasgow University in 1981 (Scots lads and lasses 
start Yoonie at a tender age!).
My Computer Science teacher was Jennifer Haselgrove.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenifer_Haselgrove

Wonderful lady, who of course did not have a degree in Comp Sci - as there were 
none when she was an undergrad.
First lecture - algorithms and debugging.
How do you make a cup of tea?  Well - describe the steps to make a cup of tea 
to your cat.
Best advice on development and debugging I have ever had. Get yourselves a cat. 
Cats are wise and can debug most any program.












On Fri, 22 Mar 2019 at 17:51, Lux, Jim (337K) via Beowulf 
<beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>> wrote:
This is somewhat off topic for the list, but what you are describing is a 
phenomenon known as “signaling” – that is, the possession of the degree isn’t 
strictly required for the task at hand (an autodidact could potentially do it), 
but that possession is a signal of other characteristics which are deemed 
desirable.

And yes, most well-known folks in the “computer science” business up to around 
1980 (well known in 1970 or 1980, I mean) most likely did not have a degree in 
CS, because they weren’t very many CS programs.  It is true that most had 
degrees in Math, Physics, Engineering though.





From: Beowulf <beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org>> 
on behalf of "beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>" 
<beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>>
Reply-To: Prentice Bisbal <pbis...@pppl.gov<mailto:pbis...@pppl.gov>>
Date: Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 1:32 PM
To: "beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>" 
<beowulf@beowulf.org<mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Beowulf] Introduction and question


Thanks for sharing this. I was recently asked for my input in a job description 
for a new position. They wanted to make the education requirements a minimum of 
a BS in Math, Physics, Engineering, or CS. I recommended that they DO NOT list 
any education requirements for this position, because most of the skills they 
were looking for (git, make files, GNU autoconf, CMake, etc.), are not taught 
in any college curriculum I know of, so a formal education is no guarantee of 
those skills. and some of the best sys admins and programmers I ever met  had 
no formal education in STEM, or at all.

I was overruled.

--
Prentice
On 3/21/19 5:08 AM, Benson Muite wrote:

"Many employers look for people who studied humanities and learned IT by 
themselves, for their wider appreciation of human values."

Mark Burgess

https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/jesa_0201_issue.pdf
On 2/23/19 4:30 PM, Will Dennis wrote:
Hi folks,

I thought I’d give a brief introduction, and see if this list is a good fit for 
my questions that I have about my HPC-“ish” infrastructure...

I am a ~30yr sysadmin (“jack-of-all-trades” type), completely self-taught (B.A. 
is in English, that’s why I’m a sysadmin :-P) and have ended up working at an 
industrial research lab for a large multi-national IT company 
(http://www.nec-labs.com). In our lab we have many research groups (as detailed 
on the aforementioned website) and a few of them are now using “HPC” 
technologies like Slurm, and I’ve become the lead admin for these groups. 
Having no prior background in this realm, I’m learning as fast as I can go :)

Our “clusters” are collections of 5-30 servers, all collections bought over 
years and therefore heterogeneous hardware, all with locally-installed OS (i.e. 
not trad head-node with PXE-booted diskless minions) which is as carefully 
controlled as I can make it via standard OS install via Cobbler templates, and 
then further configured via config management (we use Ansible.) Networking is 
basic 10GbE between nodes (we do have Infiniband availability on one cluster, 
but it’s fell into disuse now since the project that has required it has 
ended.) Storage is one or more traditional NFS servers (some use ZFS, some 
not.) We have within the past few years adopted Slurm WLM for a job-scheduling 
system on top of these collections, and now are up to three different Slurm 
clusters, with I believe a fourth on the way.

My first question for this list is basically “do I belong here?” I feel there’s 
a lot of HPC concepts it would be good for me to learn, so as I can improve the 
various research group’s computing environments, but not sure if this list is 
for much larger “true HPC” environments, or would be a good fit for a “HPC 
n00b” like me...

Thanks for reading, and let me know your opinions :)

Best,
Will


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