Public outreach

“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.

EPCC took part in Datafest18, the Data Science Festival, this year by running our own fringe event in Edinburgh and exhibiting at the Data Summit Conference.

Fringe events are key to the success of Datafest, and with over 40 running across Scotland there was plenty to choose from. We ran a small event to deliver key insights on the new developments in the application of supercomputing to large-scale data analytics and machine learning. Our colleagues gave a series of talks and attendees also had an opportunity to see a live supercomputer in action via Wee Archie. The event allowed for plenty of questions and in-depth conversations, notably around deep learning and using neural networks to solve real-life problems. It closed with Dr Adam Carter providing some further details on what makes a data scientist, and the various routes to development and further training.

For the third year running a group of us from EPCC attended the Big Bang Fair (BBF) at the NEC in Birmingham through the ARCHER Outreach programme. BBF provides an excellent opportunity to show a wide range of young people what supercomputing is about and encourage them to adopt careers in STEM-based subjects. 

We are writing our activities up to encourage others to try doing supercomputing outreach and show that you do not need fancy equipment. For more information see the ARCHER's Ambassador pack or GitHub where we develop these. We enourage you to feedback or collaborate with us.

EPCC will be at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (EISF) from Saturday March 31st until Wednesday April 4th with our exhibit Doing Big Science on Supercomputers.

For the third year running, EPCC (under the Archer banner) will be at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, explaining how scientists are using the ARCHER service to perform world-class science. 

The ARCHER service has been developing an open community where expertise and knowledge can be shared. It is designed to be inclusive and to engage with users of all HPC services in the UK: ARCHER, Tier-2 and University-level systems. There are a number of ways you can get involved...

This post was written by Olivia O'Sullivan, Impact & Engagement Officer at the Hartree Centre.

After reading about the success of EPCC’s nifty Wee Archie  mini-supercomputer outreach project, we were inspired to set a group of five work experience students the challenge of building a 20-node Raspberry Pi cluster during their time with us.

STFC runs a work experience programme every year with applicants expressing an interest in placements within the Hartree Centre. Initially, we had a view of taking just one student to join our Future Technologies team but after hearing about other placements, we wanted to move away from the ‘lone student’ experience and offer a group-based opportunity. We hoped that this would show students how we operate here in multi-disciplinary teams working together to solve challenges.

I am at SC 17 in Denver this week and having a really busy (but fun) time, giving some talks and catching up with people in the HPC community.