Public outreach

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.

Funded by EXDCI-2, EPCC is organising a 2-day workshop in Edinburgh on 8-9 July 2019 to present ideas on how science and engineering can be supported from Raspberry Pis to large scale supercomputers. We are looking to investigate how to introduce these topics to school-age audiences including linking to existing school curricula. This will include examples of existing education materials and activities and looking ahead to current plans.

For the fourth year running, from Wednesday 13^th March to Saturday 16^th of March,  EPCC will be attending the Big Bang Fair (BBF) at the NEC in Birmigham to demonstrate the wonders of supercomputing. The BBF encourages young people to adopt STEM-based subjects at school and later as a career – not only through universities but also apprenticeships and other career choices. This is also a great opportunity for our colleagues to undertake some outreach.

By Raniere Silva, Community Officer at the Software Sustainability Institute.

Apply to the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Programme 2019.

The Software Sustainability Institute is pleased to announce applications to our Fellowship Programme 2019 are now open. Below we detail the application process and what to expect from us during the recruitment and post-recruitment stages.

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.