ARCHER2 Celebration of Science 2026 and Day 0
2 April 2026
Each year the ARCHER2 Celebration of Science brings together the user community to celebrate their scientific achievements on the UK’s National High Performance Computing Service, operated by EPCC.
Last month we were delighted to welcome over 120 attendees from academia and industry to Edinburgh for the third annual ARCHER2 Celebration of Science.
To kick things off, the workshop Championing Green Digital Research, which focused on Green Digital Research Technical Professional skills, took place as the Day 0 of ARCHER2 Celebration of Science. This event looked at recent efforts to understand what skills are needed to empower researchers and other digital research technical professionals to make and advocate for positive impact in using digital research infrastructure (DRI) for research. The themes of its three sessions were Green Skills, Advocating for Change, and Changing Community Mindset.
Invited talks
During the two-day Celebration of Science, attendees enjoyed a series of invited talks, where speakers showcased their successful work enabled by ARCHER2. It was great to see how ARCHER2 continues to support impactful research across such a diverse range of scientific areas.
Poster programme
This year we received 30 high-quality posters for the well-received poster programme, including many from early career researchers and PhD students. Poster authors shared their work through lightning talks and had plenty of opportunities for discussion with other attendees during the dedicated poster session.
A special congratulations to Timothy Rafferty, University of Oxford (pictured above with EPCC Director Mark Parsons), who won this year’s Best Poster Prize for “Wind farms, understand the gravity of their atmospheric interactions”. Well done, Timothy!
See all posters with DOIs in the ARCHER2 Zenodo repository.
Interactive session
To continue fostering and supporting our service's accessibility and inclusivity, this year’s interactive session focused on four key areas: running inclusive events, website accessibility, accessibility in training, and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the eCSE programme. A big thank you to everyone who actively participated in the inspiring discussion. We have collected all inputs/feedback and will use them to identify further areas for improvement to implement.
Day 2
Day 2 began with a hybrid User Forum session, where the ARCHER2 team shared updates on the service and welcomed questions and discussions from both in-person and remote participants.
Professor Mark Parsons, Director of EPCC, then presented the keynote (shown below), providing an update on the Next National Supercomputer project. This was followed by a lively Panel Session focusing on “What research will the next generation supercomputer enable?”
In the afternoon of Day 2, the satellite session “Digital Research Landscape - Projects, Skills and Resources” brought together 11 DRI projects. Each project introduced their work, followed by discussion on the roles, skills, and training that support the digital Research Technical Professionals (“the dRTP landscape”) for the community.
We would like to thank everyone who joined us and contributed to making this year’s ARCHER2 Celebration of Science such a welcoming, collaborative, and inspiring event!
Links
The ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service is hosted and operated by EPCC.
