A review of EPCC's visit to New Scientist Live 2024

^{Above: the EPCC team awaiting the start of New Scientist Live. Image: AlistairVeryard.com.}

The three-day New Scientist Live annual science festival comprises a large exhibition that covers an impressive range of sciences. This year everything from the Royal Air Force (who had a real Red Arrows Hawk jet in the hall) to exotic insects (hands-on experiences with tropical stick insects) were represented, as well as talks from a variety of speakers. 

With over 25,000 visitors, New Scientist Live is the biggest event in the EPCC outreach year. It provides a good opportunity for us to exhibit outside our local area and to talk about how EPCC and ARCHER2, the UK national supercomputing resource, support important scientific research. 

We took along Wee Archie, our stalwart mini-supercomputer, to give visitors the opportunity to use a real supercomputer to run a wind tunnel simulation to design a wing aerofoil. If a design generates enough upward force, the aeroplane will take off. We also showed our virtual reality tour (with a full immersive headset) of the Advanced Computing Facility, our data centre that houses ARCHER2. It was good to see the number of people who were fascinated both by the tour and our explanation of the components of a data centre. 

Alongside these demos, there was an example of some supercomputing hardware, which gave people the sense of the size of a single blade and hence how big ARCHER2 is in real life! This complements our lifesize pull-up banners of a computer cabinet to show how these form part of a far larger system. 

Finally, we tested visitors' brains with some logic puzzles. Not only does this allow us to talk about the development of algorithms (and the importance of efficient algorithms in HPC and data science), but also to show the speed at which computers work. We have created some simple programs to solve the logic puzzles and demonstrate how quickly a computer can come up with an answer compared to a human!

Alongside all this were a large stash of our postcards, which highlight some of the scientific applications that are run on ARCHER2, and our special EPCC-branded rubber ducks. As well as being a great conversation starter, we use the ducks to explain the principle of "rubber duck programming", and hopefully there are people right now debugging their own code by talking to one of our rubber ducks.

Monday was dedicated to school groups, and it was great to see how much young people already know about computing. We hope some of these students will be members of EPCC in the future. 

All in all New Scientist Live is a great opportunity to both educate and promote STEM careers to young people, as well as engage with people about our work. Visitors to our stand learned about supercomputing hardware as well as applications. Many people were interested to know how performant ARCHER2 is and what its current standing is in the global rankings, as well as learning about how we can support new emerging technologies such as generative AI and quantum computing.

Despite being such a busy event (we were all ready for a rest at the end of it!), as ever we all thoroughly enjoyed chatting with hundreds of genuinely interested people - ranging from people who don't have any formal training in science to fellow academic researchers. 

We are already looking ahead to next year and the possible demos we can create to better showcase the data science side of our work.

Links

New Scientist Live: https://live.newscientist.com

Wee Archie: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/community/outreach/materials/wee_archie

"What's inside a supercomputer?" activity: https://outreach.epcc.ed.ac.uk/supercomputer

Outreach postcards: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/about/gallery/postcards.html

Rubber duck debugging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging