Wee Archie goes to Boston

The three-day AAAS conference brings together scientists, engineers and the general public from across the world to discuss latest developments. The UK presence included Wee Archie, and we premiered our aeroplane CFD demo at the event. 

Building on earlier work that used Wee Archie to model airflow over a wing and display the results, this demo has been extended to compute many of the parameters crucial for flight. Participants can then view their wing on a passenger aircraft, see how easily the aircraft will take off (or not!), and the overall range of the plane on a single tank of fuel. By then modifying the wing parameters and re-simulating on Wee Archie, the wing can be optimised for specific aspects, but with a trade-off between take-off performance and range.

I also gave a short general interest talk introducing supercomputing to the general public. I spoke about how computational science has a massive impact on our lives in ways which many don’t realise, and explained that some really exciting work in this area is being done in the UK.    

Wee Archie was very popular and constantly busy throughout the show, sparking many interesting discussions about HPC and its role in UK science and engineering.