TYPE OF SUPPORT
Background
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University (ANU) is one of the leading super-computing centres in Australia.
NCI has been supporting research communities with not only computational resources but also training workshops and materials to support users. A knowledge gap was identified between researchers in high-performance computing and those in other fields of research.
This highlighted an essential need to provide computer science training to a broad range of researchers to increase access and improve user experience with NCI systems.
With the rapid development of AI and the demand for high performance compute for increasingly diverse applications, NCI sought a training partnership to build up core user skills in the researcher community.
QCIF Role
QCIF was engaged to develop and deliver training workshops to Australian researchers using the NCI Australian Research Environment platform.
The focus of the workshops is high performance computing, machine learning, and essential research computing skills such as command line, version control and programming in Python.
Outcome & Impact
Over 500 Australian researchers have had the opportunity to learn core machine learning and programming skills on Australia's most powerful supercomputer, Gadi, with QCIF's workshops.
Highlights:
QCIF delivered 17 workshops (127.5 hr.) for NCI from 2024-11-20 to 2025-07-29.
There were 579 attendees from 894 registrations (64.8% conversion) during this period, with 320 researchers on a waitlist.
The most popular workshop was Decision Trees and Ensemble Methods in Machine Learning with 173 registrants (including waitlist)
UQ (93), UNSW (59) and QUT (53) had the highest number of researchers register for a QCIF workshop.
Forty-seven per cent of the registrants (294/620) were either a Masters or PhD student.
Four machine learning workshops were developed specifically for this partnerships, focussing on core machine learning techniques for research such as classification and decision trees.
52% of attendees indicated the highest rating (10/10) when asked: "How likely is it that you would recommend QCIF workshops to a friend or colleague?“.
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) partnered with QCIF to deliver digital skills training in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Serving both new and experienced NCI users, the collaboration expanded access to foundational and advanced digital research capabilities across the research sector.
QCIF delivered hands-on workshops covering essential foundations, including Unix shell, Git, Python, alongside machine learning techniques including, classification, regression, clustering, and convolutional neural networks. By combining NCI’s world-class computational infrastructure with QCIF’s proven expertise in digital research training, this initiative empowers researchers to build the skills they need to address complex, real-world challenges.
Our users found QCIF’s educational approach to be exceptionally practical and engaging. The Software Carpentry–inspired curriculum promoted participation from the attendees and encouraged an inclusive learning environment, helping to demystify complex topics for researchers across disciplines.
Zhuochen Wu, NCI Training Coordinator
Collaborating Organisations
Dr Abdullah Shaikh, Digital Skills Development Manager, NCI; Zhuochen Wu, Training Coordinator, NCI
