Educating HPC Users in the Use of Advanced Computing Technology

We present a multi-modal approach to educating users of Ookami, an HPE Apollo 80 testbed featuring the Fujitsu A64FX processor that is open to the community for porting and testing applications.  Achieving good performance on this Arm-based technology necessitates familiarity with details of computer architecture, performance analysis and modeling, and high-performance programming models as well as basic concepts such as vectorization, pipelining, latency/bandwidth, threads, and non-uniform memory access, topics often omitted in introductory programming courses.  We employ multiple approaches to education that emphasize (online) personal interactions and transfer of skills for our global user community. Documentation is organized around best-practices and FAQs; twice-weekly "office hours" via Zoom enable deep dives by both the team and the user community; a Slack channel provides both real time and archived answers and discussions; and we host workshops and webinars. Using these tools for education rather than just for project communication makes them more effective and contributes to community success.