Public outreach

Thank you to everyone who submitted images and videos to this year's competition. The outstanding range of entries made judging a most enjoyable experience with so many great demonstrations of the important work being done using ARCHER.

Seventeen-year-old Sam Dewar spent a week at EPCC in October as part of his school's work experience programme. In this post he describes how he got on.

I spent a week doing work experience at EPCC, where I was given the goal of setting up and testing a homemade Raspberry Pi cluster ‘Wee Archlet’ using a set of instructions provided to me. I also helped find areas for improvement in the instructions by pointing out parts that I struggled to understand so that other people who have little experience with supercomputers can make a cluster too.

While a team of EPCCers were doing outreach in London at New Scientist Live (NSLive) for a second year running, another group of us attended Bang Goes the Borders (BGTB) at St Mary's Primary School in Melrose, which is mostly attended by children aged from 5-12 with their parents. For us this is a relatively local event and this is the eighth year that we been there. It is only a day event but a pretty busy one.

Regular readers will already know that EPCC was planning to attend New Scientist Live again this year. Despite our concerns about getting to London as Storm Ali bore down on us, we made it, and I’m happy to report we had a very successful and enjoyable trip!

New Scientist Live is running again this year, and for the second time, EPCC will be bringing a stand!

New Scientist Live is a large, interactive science festival, with hundreds of speakers and exhibitors (like us!) from a wide range of disciplines. It's being held at London ExCeL again this year, and will be open to visitors from 20-23 September. As we host the national supercomputing centre, this is a great event for us to promote our work to a wide and engaged audience from all over the country.

We are pleased to announce the ARCHER Image and Video Competition 2018, and we invite all users of the national supercomputing service to share their images and videos on the theme of "ARCHER Enabling Research".

Wee Archie, our miniature model supercomputer made from Raspberry Pi boards, has been an invaluable resource in EPCC's public outreach activities. So much so that we had to build a second one!

“There is not a moment to lose” – I don’t know if you have ever read any of the Aubrey-Maturin books by the late Patrick O’Brian, set at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and describing life in the Royal Navy. Even if you have only flicked through one of the books, you will probably have picked up an almost constant sense of urgency (a realistic representation of what pervaded the Navy at that time) in the books, much to the annoyance of the decidedly un-Navy-like Dr Maturin!

Considering the modern pace of change I think this sentiment is truer today, especially in scientific fields, than it has ever been before. Certainly from my perspective there is an urgency to try and push forward the state-of-the-art in HPC and share it, before other people’s activities supersede my work. However, I think this same sense of urgency also applies to other, non-technical, aspects of our community. Diversity is a prime example here and, whilst there are some excellent initiatives being adopted by the likes of the SuperComputing (SC) and ISC conferences, we still have a long way to go.

Fourteen-year-old Alex Curtis joined us for a week of work experience in May, building a Wee Archlet (a Raspberry Pi cluster) and visiting the Advanced Computing Facility where ARCHER is hosted.

For my task I had the job of testing the instructions for the ‘Wee Archlet’ (Raspberry Pi cluster) to make sure it was understandable for people of my age. EPCC hopes that teenagers a bit older than me can open up one of their kits and build their own Wee Archlet. To create the Wee Archlet we had to make the Raspberry Pis to talk to each other in order to share out the resources from each Pi to work together as one big cluster.

Wait a minute – isn't this a blog article for EPCC ? One of the premier HPC centres in Europe, where are zombies and bean bags coming from?

Frequent readers of our blog may have twigged that this is another article about our outreach efforts at EPCC. A few weeks ago we were in Birmingham for the Big Bang Fair 2018 (one of the largest science events  for schools held in the UK) and at the beginning of April, EPCC was once again part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival.