ARCHER2 CSE team at SC22

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In November 2022, myself and William Lucas attended SC22 in Dallas to present an invited talk on behalf of the ARCHER2 CSE team at the ‘RSEs in HPC’ technical program workshop.

SC, or the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is an annual international conference which was held in Dallas, Texas in 2022. Including myself and William, we had a total of 10 staff and 2 PhD students representing EPCC across the pond. We joined 11,830 attendees to discuss the 2022 theme: HPC accelerates!

Our talk, ‘Challenges for an RSE team supporting the UK national supercomputing service’ at the ‘RSEs in HPC: Creating Community, Building Careers, Addressing Challenges’ workshop, focused on the challenges faced by the CSE team as a whole and by individual members when providing support to ARCHER2 users whilst also working to improve the service. This identified the ARCHER2 CSE team’s main challenges and how these are addressed on a day-to-day basis, plus future improvements under development. The talk was well-received and generated a lot of lively discussion amongst teams from all over.

The time spent at SC provided opportunities to engage with other members of the HPC community and keep up-to-date with latest developments and research in hardware and software. Some research was undoubtedly with a view to the future, such as a session on neuromorphic computing at the ScalAH’22 workshop which, at its most novel, covered the use of oil droplets suspended in water to form a processor for machine learning. Other workshops and papers covered developments taking place now such as approaches to approximate computing and net-zero computing, plans for SYCL and Intel Data Parallel C++, outreach and others.

As well as being able to enjoy such fantastic venues as Dallas, SC brings together like-minded people to mingle and network with – so we look forward to future conferences to showcase our ARCHER2 CSE team!