I have become involved in Compute Canada (in addition to being a grateful user of WestGrid.) I came across this critique of their recent strategic plan, Compute Canada’s “Strategic” Plan Isn’t. What interests me is that education is the main issue for Software Carpentry. One of the things in the plan is to establish a virtual HPC centre of excellence for the humanities and social sciences which would run workshops and seminars to help bring people on board.
My sense from the comments is that for funders it is more attractive to develop new technologies than to educate people to use those in place. What government brags about workshops, but petascale computing sound special.