Experience and Skills to Succeed in CLASS

Linux, automation using the command line, and programming are integral parts of the materials presented in this program. In order to be successful, participants must have:

• At least one year of using the command line for day-to-day activities.
• At least one year of programming or scripting on a regular basis.
• Experience deploying and running containers (Docker, Singularity, or similar).

Participants are expected to have experience supporting computational and data-intensive research and utilizing cloud computing. Specifically, the participant should have experience in a majority of the following areas:

• Have worked with researchers on a research computing project (either directly or indirectly).
• Have developed or helped develop a research computing workflow or have automated the operation or administration of computing systems.
• Have assisted researchers in troubleshooting performance, configuration, and other technical issues.
• Have been involved in user management (allocating or managing users, groups, and permissions).
• Have used ping, nmap, and traceroute to troubleshoot network connectivity.
• Have experience building, managing, and maintaining cloud VM and container systems.
• Have worked on at least one cloud system (AWS, Google, Azure, OpenStack, etc.) in a non-trivial manner.
• Have logged in to a cloud web-console and launched, connected to, patched, and destroyed a Virtual Machine instance.
• Have experience provisioning a cloud service account/user/role, VM, Object storage bucket, and a VPC.

An example activity that participants should be able to complete and explain to researchers for a cloud provider:

• Create a new local git repository for the project and use it during development.
• Push the local git repository to the cloud provider-hosted repository service and make it available to a collaborator utilizing cloud IAM policy.
• Create an object store (S3, Bucket, or equivalent) and store and retrieve data from the bucket using Python or another non-shell-scripting language.

Note: Given the diversity of the backgrounds in the research computing and data profession the required background and skills is not a strict set of pre-requisites but rather represents many of the skills and experiences needed in order to be successful. Participants should consult with the CLASS team if they are concerned that they may be under-qualified (or over-qualified!) for the program.

All prospective participants must complete the CLASS Self-Assessment. You must be able to answer “Yes” to all the questions. If you are unsure of the answer to a given question, you should complete available tutorials on the web and then return to the assessment once you can complete the task.  

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