I recently attended Computing Insight UK (CIUK) in Manchester on 14-15 December 2016. The two-day programme featured presentations highlighting the research enabled by HPC and an exhibition showcasing the latest HPC technologies.

One of the more unusual HPC machines that was talked about was the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre's "Wee Archie", which is a cluster of 18 Raspberry Pis that EPCC uses for outreach activities aimed at getting schoolchildren interested in HPC. (see picture). According to Nick Brown, who gave the presentation in which Wee Archie featured, EPCC plan to release building instructions for a scaled-down version called "Wee Archlet" that people can experiment with at school or home.

The conference was held at Manchester Central, which is a conference and exhibition centre housed in a former railway station. The station opened in 1880 and was closed in 1969, and was left derelict until converted to its current role in 1982. Its roof remains the second-widest unsupported single-span iron arch in Britain (see below); the widest is that of London St. Pancras railway station.

Nick Dingle (Numerical Algorithms Group)