EPCC outreach at the 2025 Edinburgh Science Festival
2 May 2025
EPCC delivers a diverse programme of engagement activities to the general public, covering computational science, supercomputing and data science. Catherine Inglis writes about her experience as a new member of the EPCC outreach team, attending the Edinburgh Science Festival in April.
The theme of this year’s Edinburgh Science Festival was “Spaceship Earth”, with a focus on sustainability, space exploration, and emerging technologies.
These themes tie in closely with EPCC’s priorities: emerging technologies are of course core to EPCC’s mission, and energy efficiency is now as important as compute power in new hardware design. Issues such as efficient cooling systems are integral to our Advanced Computing Facility (the ACF), where we are working towards net zero. Our HPC facilities are used by researchers developing future green technologies. Although not one of EPCC’s main activities, we even managed to tie in the space exploration theme via one of our puzzles!
Engaging the public
Our booth offered:
- A Virtual Reality tour of ARCHER2 and the ACF plant room.
- A display of hardware showcasing the past, present and future of our HPC resources.
- A set of logic puzzles to encourage visitors to think like a computer programmer.
- Our popular “design an aeroplane wing” demo, giving visitors a chance to get hands-on running a simulation on Wee Archie, our mini supercomputer made of Raspberry Pi units.
This was my first time helping out with EPCC’s outreach activities – and my first time experiencing the Edinburgh Science Festival from the other side, rather than as a parent visiting with children.
Our location in a free drop-in outreach booth inside the Dynamic Earth visitor centre lobby meant that we had a real variety of people coming by. Booth visitors ranged from those with only a basic knowledge of computers to those who had worked in the computing sector, as well as a researcher from the University of Leeds whose colleagues make good use of ARCHER2.
There was a steady flow of people to the booth throughout the day. Even before the doors had opened, we had noticed a large number of teenagers in high-visibility bibs waiting to come in, and were a bit worried that they would swamp us right at the start of the event. However, they were the perfect visitors – they were interested in every part of our display, engaged well with all our activities, and were extremely friendly and polite. I enjoyed chatting to them and their teachers about EPCC, and also about their experience visiting Scotland – it turned out that they were on a school trip from Istanbul. I couldn’t have asked for a better start to my first time doing outreach!
The information and activities we had at the booth meant that we were able to engage in different ways with both children and adults. There was a constant queue of people of all ages keen to try out the VR technology to take a virtual tour of the ACF.
Design an aircraft wing
Adults and children also all enjoyed the “design an aircraft wing” activity, which allowed them to change the design of an aircraft wing and then run a simulation to see whether a plane with their wing design would take off – and to see how far it would travel if it did. This activity was really popular – particularly among pairs of siblings who would get quite competitive! In fact, we had a few repeat visitors over the day, who came back to see if they could improve on their previous result – or finally beat their sibling’s result. The simulations were run on our Raspberry Pi mini-supercomputer, Wee Archie. One delighted boy exclaimed “That’s my name!”, so I made sure he went away with a “Wee Archie” sticker.
While the children were busy designing aircraft wings, I had a number of interesting conversations with adults around our display of HPC hardware of the past, present and future. Adults of course have more of a perspective on the rapid evolution of technology – and several remembered the flashing LEDs of the CM200 used in the film Jurassic Park! (The CM200 was the most powerful supercomputer in the UK when installed at EPCC in 1991, but was significantly less powerful than the average smartphone now). ARCHER2, the current UK National Supercomputer, is a relatively old HPC system now but was still ranked first in the UK in the Top500 list of November 2024. Loooking towards the future, the Cerebras CS-3 system designed for AI is a current hot topic.
Logic puzzles
However, my favourite activity was the set of logic puzzles. They all represent ways of thinking in computer programming, e.g. breaking down a problem into steps, and working within time and/or equipment constraints. These kept children and adults alike occupied for a considerable amount of time. I was surprised how few people already knew the fox, chicken and grain puzzle, as this is one I came across as a child. On the other hand, I hadn’t come across the more challenging river crossing puzzle before, and actually needed one of my colleagues to explain it to me just before the doors opened, as I couldn’t work it out! It turned out I was not the only one, and it had most people stumped. One man spent about 15 minutes determined to find an answer, before eventually admitting defeat. I found it really interesting to watch people trying to solve the puzzles and would gently guide them towards working out the solution if they gave up. They key to both of these puzzles lies in realising something slightly counterintuitive and it was great to see the lightbulb moment when it happened!
Overall, it was a really fun day, and I enjoyed the combination of the science outreach and meeting people of all ages and from lots of different backgrounds, and I look forward to helping out again at next year’s Science Festival.
Outreach at EPCC
We provide a wealth of online resources targeted at both school children and lifelong learners.
In addition to worksheets and games, our timeline of computing facilities at EPCC provides an insight into how supercomputers have developed over the years. See our website for details and downloads:
