Introducing Ubuntu’s new HPC community team

The High-Performance Computing (HPC) community team is the latest engineering team to join the Ubuntu project. What exactly is HPC? It is a multidisciplinary field that uses supercomputers, and high-performance clusters to solve advanced computational problems. The term “HPC” itself is commonly used to refer to computational science, also known as scientific computing. HPC also involves implementing several programming paradigms such as parallel computing, distributed computing, and grid computing; the list goes on.

So why does Ubuntu need an HPC team? Well… it’s because HPC is everywhere around you! HPC is used to:

• Discover new medicines and ground-breaking medical treatments.
• Predict severe meteorological events before they occur.
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• Train complex artificial intelligence models.
• Study the effects of climate change on local ecosystems.
• Identify new renewable energy sources.
• And more.

Ubuntu also needs an HPC team because open source software drives innovation. With the explosion of Large-Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, compounded with the increasing use of artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives, it is more important now than ever that we ensure that individuals have access to high-quality, open source HPC applications and infrastructure on Ubuntu. Scientia potentia est – knowledge is power – and it should be accessible to everyone.

What are the Ubuntu HPC team’s goals?

The Ubuntu HPC team’s primary goal is to provide the best free and open source HPC stack for Ubuntu, starting with packaging popular scientific applications and going all the way to developing user-friendly cloud infrastructure and deployment tools. Other goals for the team include:

• Hosting community workshops around various open source HPC technologies.
• Advocating for the adoption of Ubuntu for HPC workloads by attending local community meetups and industry conferences.
• Providing a collaborative environment for open source HPC communities, projects, professionals, and hobbyists to engage with the wider Ubuntu community.
• Celebrating the successes of those currently using Ubuntu for their HPC-related work.

Who can get involved?

Are you passionate about open source HPC? Are you an HPC cluster administrator, architect, or user? Are you involved with a project that you want to make work better on Ubuntu? Do you just want to learn more about HPC and its various applications in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or computational science in general? 

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then Ubuntu HPC is the community for you! The Ubuntu HPC community team is open to anyone and everyone.

How to get involved?

Interested in joining the Ubuntu HPC community team to help make Ubuntu a better platform for HPC? Awesome!

The team hosts public calls every Wednesday at 16:30 UTC on Jitsi. These live calls are where members will meet to discuss current initiatives and challenges within the community. It is also a great opportunity to meet face-to-face with other HPC professionals and enthusiasts.

If you cannot attend the weekly calls, then no worries! The team also has a public Matrix space on matrix.org. This space is where HPC aficionados and community members chat outside of the weekly calls and coordinate with one another. Send your introductory message to the General room and let the conversation start.

Want some more information before joining? Feel free to check out the Ubuntu HPC team’s official community page.

What’s next?

A lot of exciting things are happening within the Ubuntu HPC community. The team is just getting started, but it is already working together from building an open source HPC cloud platform to speaking at top conferences. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements about community workshops and latest developments. The future is bright!

Still on the fence?

Interested in joining the team, but want to learn more about what they do first? Feel free to check out some of their content, like their introductory series on HPC and their recently published Guide to HPC.