Public outreach

EPCC held its first GPU hackathon this April in partnership with NVIDIA, hosting 28 participants and 20 mentors across seven teams. The event was held virtually due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Using Zoom and Slack, individual teams were able to work alongside mentors in separate breakout rooms and channels.

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.

From 10–13 October, EPCC were exhibitors at New Scientist Live 2019. Various members of EPCC attended – as well as myself, there were Outreach regulars Gordon Gibb, Oliver Brown, Juan Rodriguez Herrera, and Ben Morse, as well as relative newbies Darren White, Spyro Nita, and Evgenij Belikov.

Set in the heart of the Scottish Borders and home to Melrose Abbey and Melrose RFC, a visit to Melrose is always a pleasure. Organised by St Mary's School, Bang Goes the Borders (21st September 2019) is a science festival aimed at families. Entirely free, the festival has loads of workshops and drop in sessions.  The ARCHER team and Wee Archie​ were sat alongside workshops and activities around lego robots, apple juice making, plaque busting, bees, birds, and much, much more.

Caelen Feller, a PRACE Summer of HPC(link is external) (SoHPC) student working with Wee Archie, gives us the final status report of his project. You can also read his original post.

We are pleased to announce the ARCHER Image and Video Competition 2019, and we invite all users of the national supercomputing service to share their images and videos on the theme of "ARCHER Enabling Research".

Caelen Feller, a PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) student working with Wee Archie, gives us an overview and status report of his project.

As I have said previously, I’m working with Wee ARCHIE, EPCC's mini supercomputer, this summer. Wee Archie is made of 16 Raspberry Pi chips – each very small, lightweight computers connected together to work as a single machine. With each chip is an attached LED panel, allowing me to display what is occurring on the chip and how it is communicating to other chips. I have created a series of tutorials and simple demonstrations to be run on Wee Archie which explain the basics of message passing using MPI to a complete novice in parallel computing and non-expert in computers in general. 

ARCHER Training report Summer 2019

So, it's been another busy end to the academic year and summer training season for the ARCHER Training team.

Since June we have managed to cram in no less than twelve training courses, in locations from London to Leeds, and Oxford to EPCC here in Edinburgh.

PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) offers summer placements at HPC centres across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and/or Masters students. Up to twenty top applicants from across Europe spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work. Here are the three SoHPC visitors who are collaborating on projects with EPCC staff. 

Women in HPC (WHPC) was set up in 2013 to tackle the problem of diversity in HPC through research and education. EPCC initiated the WHPC programme and EPSRC supported the initiative. We were therefore very pleased to be accepted as one of the first WHPC chapters, developing a chapter that encompasses all of the UK. We held a successful launch event in May, with attendees from different organisation from across the UK.