This week, Becker Library Senior Support Scientist Marcy Vana was featured as a speaker at the virtual conference of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Her presentation, “A Collaborative Approach to Supporting Research and High Performance Computing,” showcased an innovative and ongoing partnership she has helped to create between Becker Library and the Center for High Performance Computing.
Biomedical researchers increasingly need basic programming skills and access to shared computing resources to conduct their research. In response to this evolving research environment, Becker Medical Library and the Center for High Performance Computing at Washington University in St. Louis formed a partnership to support the use of biomedical data analysis software designed for a cluster environment and to develop a series of introductory research computing workshops aimed at researchers new to programming and cluster computing.
Demand for the introductory research computing workshops, in particular, has been very high, suggesting that there is a significant need for support in this area on campus. In order to meet this need, we have extended this successful collaboration to include the recently created Institute for Informatics, allowing us to begin to cover additional topics and further support the research community on campus.