SC25 session: Building sustainable HPC outreach

Since most people don’t directly encounter high performance computing (HPC) in their daily lives, effective outreach is key to increasing its profile by explaining complex concepts, inspiring future talent, and demonstrating real-world relevance. 

To succeed, outreach efforts must engage with a broad and diverse audience, including researchers, students (from primary through to post-graduate level), professionals using HPC in their work, policymakers, funding agencies, and the general public.

Each group brings varying levels of familiarity, interest and connection to HPC and computational science. Such diversity calls for a range of outreach approaches, tailored to different backgrounds and knowledge levels. Whether introducing fundamental concepts or exploring advanced technical topics, our outreach activities must be adaptable, inclusive and designed to meet people where they are, whilst still inspiring them to engage and learn more. 

Outreach challenges

However, many organisations face challenges when developing or sustaining their outreach efforts, mostly due to a lack of dedicated outreach staff or limited time and funding. Creating new materials from scratch can quickly become unsustainable and hinder wider engagement. The HPC outreach ecosystem is already rich with creative and impactful activities, but many have been developed by individual centres to meet a specific goal or context, such as hosting a local science fair. However, with thoughtful adaptation and robust guidance, many of these existing resources can be reused and repurposed to serve the broader HPC community. 

Practical outreach strategies

The SC25 session Building Sustainable HPC Outreach: Reinvent, Reuse, Repurpose aims to address this by exploring practical strategies so that all centres, regardless of size or outreach experience, can more effectively engage diverse audiences. 

We have defined three scenarios when using existing materials: 

1. Reuse:  In the most straightforward case, we may be able to take an existing activity and use it again, largely as it was originally designed or with only minor adjustments. This works well when your new use has a similar audience or similar setting. The “reuser” has a very low barrier to getting started! They just need to know enough about the activity, key concepts and gather the materials to get started with ease.
2. Repurpose: Different organisations may want to connect with different audiences in different settings or for different purposes. In this case, an existing outreach activity can be adapted to accommodate these differences. This may require moderate levels of change, with the goal being to ensure that the material is still relevant and engaging for the new context. In this fashion, we can extend the life of outreach activities and enable new centres to match existing activities to their needs.
3. Reinvent:  In other cases, organisations may find they need to communicate an entirely different learning objective or idea. But this doesn’t mean they need to start from scratch! An existing outreach activity can be used as the basis for a new one, using the same materials to inspire the creation of a new activity from a foundation that is proven to work. This approach offers space for creativity and new ideas, while circumventing the need to start from a blank page.

Each of these approaches requires care and attention to important factors, such as accessibility, communication style, and background knowledge of the audience, to ensure effective and impactful outreach.

Join our session at SC25!

Join us at SC25 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA to learn how to make your outreach efforts more sustainable! Building Sustainable HPC Outreach: Reinvent, Reuse, Repurpose: 12:15pm on Wednesday 19 November.

If you aren’t attending SC25, the outputs of this session will be posted via the Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) network.

EPCC Outreach

EPCC has a well-established programme of outreach activities. See our dedicated outreach website for details.