EPCC at Doors Open Day 2025
30 September 2025
Every year Doors Open Days open up buildings in Scotland that would not normally be accessible to the public. Over the last 35 years this festival has expanded to involve 32 council regions in Scotland, with over 1000 events.
The University of Edinburgh contributes by opening up a number of its buildings to the public and providing activities that are representative of the type of work undertaken across its estate. This year we joined the Doors Open Day at the Bayes Centre in central Edinburgh, where EPCC is based, and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.
Bayes Centre
We offered visitors to the Bayes Centre two activities. Firstly a virtual reality (VR) tour of ARCHER2, the current national supercomputing service, which is operated by EPCC at the Advanced Computing Facility. This high-security building is not open to the general public, but the VR tour with a VR headset provides enables them to see what a supercomputer looks like. Also, if they have not experienced a VR headset before, then this too is interesting.
Secondly – and my favourite activity – a coloured object-sorting task demonstrated the benefits of small-scale parallelism. In it, one person sorts as many coloured balls/bean bags as they can into appropriately coloured buckets within 30 seconds. They are then joined by more people to see whether they can sort more items in parallel in 30 seconds.
Usually the answer is yes although there are constraints, and so lots of beautiful analogies can be drawn that correspond to the real thing: programming parallel computers with contention, algorithmic improvements, strategies which touch on what we do at EPCC in our day-to-day jobs, and so on. We can also plot the performance (see the graph below).
Unlike the systems we work with, which are generally composed of the same type of processor throughout (a homogeneous system), with people you invariably get a heterogeneous system (eg a 6-year-old collaborating with their parent), which is the beauty of this activity. It also appeals to all ages, from a family working together to a couple of law students trying hard to get the highest score across the board (which they did).
About 270 people came to Bayes' Doors Open Day. We hope that many went away with an improved understanding of what supercomputers are, how parallelism helps add super to a computer, and what we do here at EPCC.
Royal Observatory Edinburgh
On the other side of Edinburgh, EPCC staff also played a small part in the Doors Open Days event at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. George Beckett presented the joint EPCC-Institute of Astronomy work on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory telescope, images from which will be processed and analysed here in Edinburgh on the Somerville research cloud.
Over the course of the weekend, more than 2,200 people visited the Observatory, learning about Edinburgh's long and famous history of astronomy and how Edinburgh's mission to be a data capital is helping it prepare for next-generation astronomy surveys.
