HMC
Scientific Computing at HMC: Interview Report
This report describes the results of a series of interviews with faculty and staff members at Harvey Mudd College. The interviews had two main goals: to assess the scientific computing needs of faculty and to discover the current uses of scientific computing resources by faculty.
The interviews were conducted between March 27, 2009 and July 22, 2009, with a total of 25 faculty and 3 staff members across the seven academic departments at HMC. The interviewees were chosen from those who said they had been involved in using scientific computing in their teaching, research, and professional support as well as from those who were recommended for the interviews by each department chair.
Each interview lasted about 30 minutes. Interviewees were asked a series of questions regarding usages of scientific computing resources and support wishes for the new scientific computing specialist at the CIS department.
The first outcome of the interviews was a job description of the new hire, Scientific Computing Specialist, at CIS. The CIS department has posted the job description on HigherEdJobs.com, SoCalHerc.org and the HMC web site.
In summarizing the interviews, we outline two main subjects: scientific computing support wishes and scientific computing resource usages. The information about support wishes was used to write the job description for the Scientific Computing Specialist position. Using the up-to-date resource usage information, we developed a schematic view to visually map users and tools/systems on a 2-dimensional space. Details of the two themes follow.
25 faculty interviewees had mentioned a wide variety of support wishes that might be useful and helpful in conducting their scholarly activities using scientific computing resources. To find common expectations, we listed all quality-wise remarks and grouped them by common themes. We found that the support wishes could be grouped into three themes: consultation, pedagogy, and tech support. We report them here as three roles of the scientific computing specialist: a scientific computing consultant role, an associative teaching and research staff role, and a technical support personnel role.
Scientific Computing Interview Report
Scientific Computing at HMC: Interview Report
1. Introduction
The interviews were conducted between March 27, 2009 and July 22, 2009, with a total of 25 faculty and 3 staff members across the seven academic departments at HMC. The interviewees were chosen from those who said they had been involved in using scientific computing in their teaching, research, and professional support as well as from those who were recommended for the interviews by each department chair.
Each interview lasted about 30 minutes. Interviewees were asked a series of questions regarding usages of scientific computing resources and support wishes for the new scientific computing specialist at the CIS department.
The first outcome of the interviews was a job description of the new hire, Scientific Computing Specialist, at CIS. The CIS department has posted the job description on HigherEdJobs.com, SoCalHerc.org and the HMC web site.
In summarizing the interviews, we outline two main subjects: scientific computing support wishes and scientific computing resource usages. The information about support wishes was used to write the job description for the Scientific Computing Specialist position. Using the up-to-date resource usage information, we developed a schematic view to visually map users and tools/systems on a 2-dimensional space. Details of the two themes follow.
2. Scientific Computing Support Wishes
25 faculty interviewees had mentioned a wide variety of support wishes that might be useful and helpful in conducting their scholarly activities using scientific computing resources. To find common expectations, we listed all quality-wise remarks and grouped them by common themes. We found that the support wishes could be grouped into three themes: consultation, pedagogy, and tech support. We report them here as three roles of the scientific computing specialist: a scientific computing consultant role, an associative teaching and research staff role, and a technical support personnel role.
2.1 Three roles of Scientific Computing Specialist
A scientific computing consultant role
Faculty members at HMC wish to have a person or a team who can:
- Make suggestions on finding right (or alternative) resources
- Show right (or alternative) methods on solving problems by being knowledgeable about the latest advances and available resources of scientific computing on campus as well as outside campus.
An associative teaching and research staff role
Faculty members at HMC wish to have a person or a team who can:
- Teach basic usages of Matlab, R, (scientific use of) Excel, Gaussian, LabVIEW, SolidWorks, Python, LaTeX and Gnuplot to faculty and students
- Write, update and test tutorials of such scientific computing tools
- Be a resource that the faculty members can recommend to students who need help on using and learning such scientific computing tools by offering seminars, crash courses, online/offline tutorial sessions, and one-on-one support.
A technical support personnel role
Faculty members at HMC wish to have a person or a team who can:
- Take care of scientific computing software licensing, new version updates and teaching/research lab computer maintenance
- Support programming such as C/C++, Java, and Python (Note: this role may overlap with the pedagogical role above.).
3. Scientific Computing Resource Usages
An important aspect of the faculty interviews was to discover the current usage of scientific computing resources at HMC so that it may be used to facilitate CIS’ client-centered service strategies correctly and effectively. Gathering scientific computing usage statistics, we have discovered several interesting aspects:
- 56% of scientific computing users use Matlab.
- Mathematica is preferred over other similar tools such as Mathcad and Maple.
- There is a surprisingly high demand for parallel processing and High Performance Computing for a variety of different tasks.
- 24% of the interviewees express their intention to learn or use R for statistical computing mainly because it is a free and powerful alternative to expensive commercial statistical applications such as SPSS and SAS.
- There is a growing interest and demand for open source tools such as R, LaTeX and discipline specific libraries.
- Many faculty members have used programming languages such as C/C++, Java, Fortran, and Python for their courses and research projects, and have needed practical support to some extent.
To help see the whole picture of scientific computing resource usages at HMC, we developed a schematic in which scientific computing tools and users are mapped. The scientific computing space is described in detail in the full report and current scientific computing space is available at http://www3.hmc.edu/scspace.
Please download the report (pdf) for complete details.
Copyright 2012 Harvey Mudd College