DOE Seeks to Mend HPC Talent Gap

Get a group of HPC stakeholders in a room and it won’t be long before they are bemoaning the talent shortage, the gap between the demand for a well-trained HPC workforce versus the number of qualified candidates available to fulfill these positions. Despite the attention paid to this topic, the HPC talent gap has been a thorn in a field that is increasingly understood to be synonymous with a nation’s leadership potential. And while the issue crosses industry and government boundaries, the Department of Energy (DOE) has additional reason to be concerned due to the significance of its mission, which includes such sensitive areas as cyber- and nuclear security, not to mention being a testbed for innovation and discovery.
Given the importance of scientific computation to the federally-funded DOE centers, the DOE’s Office of Science set out to explore the issue further, by charging the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) with identifying the causes of the shortage and the solutions considered most likely to reverse the trend. At SC14 in New Orleans, the ASCAC subcommittee Chairperson Barbara Chapman of the University of Houston revealed key findings and recommendations, further detailed in this 26-page report.
The study’s authors collected data from national laboratories, university computing programs and previous reports on workforce preparedness, noting several relevant trends that shed light on different dimensions of this challenge. The initial finding confirmed the prevailing suspicions that indeed all DOE national laboratories face workforce recruitment and retention challenges in computing sciences fields relevant to labs’ missions. The situation could become even more problematic as large numbers of DOE employees are expected to retire in the coming decade.
The major contributor for the talent shortage is the lack of computing science graduates, with US citizens, females and minorities being especially underrepresented. For example, foreign nationals currently account for more than half of the graduate students in Ph.D.-granting computer science programs. This leaves labs seeking candidates from an international pool, which has the effect of extending already-long lag times between the time a position is posted and when it can be filled. The report notes that it takes 100 days to fill a DOE job versus 48 to 50 days to fill a similar position in industry. When US citizenship is a requirement, as is the case at the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) labs, it can take upwards of 200 days to fill a position.
The subcommittee further reported a lack of diversity in the talent pool. The percentage of women graduating with computing degrees is just 17.2 percent for computer science and 18 percent for all computing doctorates. Hispanic and African-American students comprise less than 4 percent of computing doctorate recipients.
Another factor according to the study is an uneven distribution in specialties with “hot” topics like artificial intelligence and robotics being favored at the expense of a solid HPC foundation in algorithms, applied mathematics, data analysis and visualization, and high-performance computing systems. These skills are cross-disciplinary, requiring a mix of computing, math and science skills. Although well-designed computational science degrees and specializations are popping up at institutions across the country, these are still ad-hoc programs and not prevalent enough at this juncture to significantly amend the shortage.
One of the most effective tools that addresses these primary root causes, both the lack of interest in computing degrees and in the core HPC subject matter, is outreach and recruitment.
The subcommittee pointed to several already-established DOE-facilitated programs as being critical to bolstering computing sciences workforce. The list of successful outreach efforts includes a five-year program from the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium partnership. Focused on training a generation of nuclear scientists, the program reached more than 100 students since it was established. The DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) is another one that that is paying dividends, rated highly effective in multiple reviews, according to Chapman. The fellowship trains students in interdisciplinary knowledge and provides DOE lab experience. The subcommittee recommends expanding the DOE CSGF program and using it as a model for new fellowship programs in areas pertinent to DOE lab needs, such as exascale algorithms and extreme computing.
Given the shortfalls of existing academic programs in meeting the needs of current and future methodologies, such as exascale computing, the subcommittee recommends the establishment of DOE-supported computing leadership graduate curriculum advisory group to publish curricular competencies guidelines at the graduate and undergraduate level with the aim of influencing curriculum development efforts.
Other recommendations focused on the importance of boosting the DOE’s visibility on university and college campuses as well as the need to work with other agencies to “pro-actively recruit, mentor and increase the involvement of significantly more women, minorities, people with disabilities, and other underrepresented populations into active participation in CS&E careers.”
The subcommittee notes that the interesting career opportunities offered by the DOE national laboratories will be a natural draw with increased awareness, yet elements of lab culture could be made more appealing to today’s mobile generation. In this regard, the report recommends uniform measures across the DOE laboratories to facilitate incentives like ongoing relocation assistance, lifetime professional development, and a sabbatical program. In order to implement such strategies, the DOE would need to examine the laboratory funding model and its relationship to recruiting and retention.
“This is an issue for the whole supercomputing community,” says Chapman in a DOE feature article on the report. “Meeting the mission-critical workforce needs of the national laboratories will require leadership to address this lack of diversity and to design outreach programs to attract a more diverse student population.”