Welcome to PEARC20! PEARC20’s theme is “Catch the Wave.” This year’s theme embodies the spirit of the community’s drive to stay on pace and in front of all the new waves in technology, analytics, and a globally connected and diverse workforce. We look forward to this year’s PEARC20 virtual meeting, where we can share scientific discovery and craft the future infrastructure.
The conference will be held in Pacific Time (PT) and the times listed below are in Pacific Time.
The connection information for all PEARC20 workshops, tutorials, plenaries, track presentations, BOFs, Posters, Visualization Showcase, and other affiliated events, are in the PEARC20 virtual conference platform, Brella. If you have issues joining Brella, please email pearcinfo@googlegroups.com.
Training and documentation for on-premises infrastructure represent the foundation of most institutional support for computational researchers. For most academic research institutions, however, these approaches fall short of meeting the needs of diverse researchers with different levels of experience with data-intensive research. We describe a framework for characterizing levels of computational expertise and relate this model to informational support provided for biomedical researchers at a non-profit/academic research center. Our model differentiates between novice, competent practitioner, and expert users of reproducible computational methods, and is related to the composition and needs of an entire research community. We specify methods best suited for researchers with different levels of expertise, including formally structured short courses, code examples/templates, and online wiki-style documentation. We provide recommendations to encourage the development and deployment of these resources, and suggest methods for assessing their effectiveness. Supporting multiple types of informational resources for researchers with different computational needs can be labor-intensive, but ideally increases computational ability for the entire institution.
