Newly hired in HPC user support in academia - seeking guidance.
Hi all,
I recently made a lateral career move coming from a physics PhD research background to an HPC user support role in academia. I managed to get interviews with national labs (remote) and two major R1 universities (remote and on-site) and one of them gave me a chance. Unfortunately the job I got is on-site in a place I really don't want to live in, but after a year unemployed I couldn't afford to be picky.
I'm hoping to make the most of my time at this role and learn enough to position myself for a similar or better role that is either remote or in a more favorable location for my family in hopefully a year's time. I will be the only trained scientist in a small group and from what I've gathered, I presumably will be having to wear many hats and learn a lot of new things outside my wheelhouse, while also teaching faculty/students how to best use batch schedulers, parallelize tasks and debug performance issues - which I did a lot of in my research career.
For those of you employed in this area, what are absolute musts that a physicist like myself must learn to broaden their resume and be more marketable? The school will pay for certifications which helps, and I will have some ability to conduct my independent research and help with grant-writing (for whatever that's worth now...). I am currently clueless about emerging technologies with HPC, I'm old-school and mostly worked with a lot of massively-parallelized Fortran fluid codes on largely just compute nodes with MPI in my academic career, with very little GPU stuff so that's low hanging fruit. What else?