Teaching Medical Students to Use Supercomputers: A Personal Reflection

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.