HPC Carpentry Approved as The Carpentries' Fourth Lesson Program

On 5 February 2026, our Board of Directors voted unanimously to approve the adoption of HPC Carpentry as the fourth official lesson program of The Carpentries, alongside the Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lesson programs. In this post, our Director of Curriculum and members of the HPC Carpentry Steering Committee reflect on an exciting moment and explore what is involved in operationalising a new lesson program.

A Message from the Director of Curriculum

After a successful incubation period stretching back to June 2024, I am thrilled that HPC Carpentry will join The Carpentries in 2026. I have enjoyed working with the community as they prepared their application for adoption, and am particularly excited by the vision for the future of the project that the Steering Committee set out in their Strategic Plan.

Since the incubation of HPC Carpentry was announced, we have observed a lot of engagement from Carpentries community members in the project’s regular community meetings. I am not surprised: there is such a natural fit between the two projects, thanks in large part to the dedication of the HPC Carpentry community to the culture and values that The Carpentries promotes. It will feel so great to start running HPC Carpentry workshops as official Carpentries events later this year.

There is plenty to do before then, though! The adoption of a new lesson program touches every aspect of the Core Team’s work, from our workshop administration systems to our brand identity. The team is keen to integrate HPC Carpentry but, with a large part of our collective capacity already committed to the launch of our new Partnership Program, we cannot pull everything together as quickly as we might like. HPC Carpentry will launch as a full lesson program on 1 September 2026.

Between then and now, the HPC Carpentry community and Carpentries Core Team will continue to work closely together to integrate the lesson program. Highlights of that process will be announced on this blog, beginning with the development of onboarding for Carpentries Instructors to teach HPC Carpentry workshops. Community members will lead the first of these onboarding sessions in a few weeks’ time, at the German Conference for Research Software Engineering (deRSE26) in Stuttgart.

Get Involved!

This is the perfect time to get involved with the HPC Carpentry community! Here are some of the ways you could help us make the adoption as successful as possible:

• Share this blog post with your network.
• Teach an HPC Carpentry workshop.
• Join an HPC Carpentry community meeting.
• Contribute to an HPC Carpentry lesson.
• Volunteer to maintain an HPC Carpentry lesson in the upcoming round of Maintainer Onboarding, to be announced on this blog next week.

A Message from the HPC Carpentry Steering Committee

We are excited! It has been a long time coming, and there are good reasons HPC Carpentry is becoming a lesson program today. Massive amounts of HPC, AI, and Quantum computing resources are being made available to researchers. It is a huge opportunity… but hardware is never enough: it is a tool, and you need the people who can use the tool. HPC Carpentry is a grass roots response to the need for a truly scalable approach to introductory HPC training and education. Our project and The Carpentries share values of technical capability coupled with empathy and inclusiveness. Computing, even high performance computing, is not magic or something that depends on your background, it is a skill that can be taught, and a force-multiplier for research.

Supported by HPC Carpentry and compute resources provided by the community, Annajiat has already inspired and enabled ~1000 undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers in Bangladesh, leading to the creation of a new elective undergraduate course on Parallel, Distributed, and High-Performance Computing (HPC), postgraduate courses on Distributed Computing Systems and Parallel Algorithms, and frequent workshops on a range of topics. Andrew, Trevor, Wirawan and others have delivered workshops at many institutions around North America, including multiple invited visits to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Alan has led a similar program of workshops in Europe, and the community has delivered plenty more in their local communities. As a lesson program of The Carpentries, we will be able to grow this impact even further, touching the lives of more learners, globally.

A perennial danger of projects like this is the temptation to get into the weeds on technical issues at the expense of the health of the project as a whole. The Lesson Program Incubation process, with its list of criteria, helped to remind us that what we were seeking was more than a technical solution to delivering content. Ultimately, it was about changing the lives of learners for the better, with lessons that benefit from learner and instructor feedback, a supportive community, and a program that empowers learners to move forward with greater confidence, independently of their background.

We would not have made it to this pivotal moment without the efforts of many HPC Carpentry community members past and present. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project, hosted or taught a workshop, and engaged with the community up to now. Our deepest gratitude in particular to Peter Steinbach, Benson Muite, Marc-André Hermanns, Christina Koch, Md. Intekhabul Hafiz, M. Abdur Rahman, and Jannetta Steyn.