Dask HPC Community Engagement

There are many HPC administrators that support Dask at their institution. They all have variants of the same problems (wrestling with job schedulers, getting fast interconnects to work, arguing for more support for interactive/Jupyter workflows, dealing with NFS). It would be useful if these folks had a place to communicate with each other comfortably, and hopefully generate content to engage other HPC centers.

Today probably the most active place is the dask-jobqueue issue tracker (thanks @lesteve and @guillaumeeb for maintaining that). Are there other community building activities that we might want to try?

A comment from @rcthomas

> On community. What has worked for Jupyter in HPC I think, is (1) we had a workshop that that helped us learn who was doing what at what facility and (2) out of that we were able to put together a few interest networks of people who periodically get together to chase issues, discuss developments, share lessons learned, best practices, and plan future events. What has not worked well is mailing lists (they just go silent); a Slack channel was set up but also doesn't see much traffic. Vendor engagement is a plus.

> The Dask developer workshop held a couple months ago went some distance and I was able to make connections and build understanding of what the community is doing but HPC representation was smallish and there is (for now, but my guess is it won't last forever) a gap between enterprise and HPC Dask. Seeing what's going on in enterprise is very exciting and educational but not always immediately applicable.

Are there options that we could do here that would interest people?

cc @lesteve @guillaumeeb @rcthomas @kmpaul @andersy005 @piprrr @rabernat @jhamman @zonca @stuarteberg @rsignell-usgs @pwolfram @d-v-b