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Baking Good Ideas:

We recently took the CAKE project to the ARCHER2 Celebration of Science 2025, marking only the second time we’ve presented CAKE to the community (read about our first presentation at the SSI Collaborations Workshop 2025 in this blog here)!

Eleanor Broadway presented our poster, sharing the core ideas and future plans of the CAKE project with the ARCHER2 community. This event brought the scientific researchers using ARCHER2 - the UK’s national supercomputing service - and the service providers together to celebrate the science enabled by high performance computing (HPC).

It was a fantastic opportunity to gather input from bother user and support perspectives, helping us to what is most important to the community right now. At this early stage of the project, it is so important that our plans are grounded in real-world needs and listening to feedback ensures we are building a network that is genuinely useful to the community.

Here’s the poster presented by Eleanor:

Blooming Good Ideas

In addition to presenting the CAKE project, Eleanor also continued the theme of creative knowledge exchange by leading a session as part of her role in the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) community. This “Blooming Good Ideas” session focused on a unique brainstorming technique that leverages the diverse perspectives and backgrounds within a group to collaboratively and iteratively develop the best ideas. It was a great way to demonstrate that diversity in experiences/perspectives/skills is a strength that leads to better outcomes.

Here are some of the ideas and outcomes discussed by the groups:

  • How can we make HPC services more sustainable?
    • Introduce energy-based pricing models
    • Increase transparency around the energy and cost impact of each run
  • What support can we implement to help early-career researchers gain confidence?
  • Providing mentoring for all opportunities, with inclusive channels routes to raise concerns and ask questions.
  • Create frameworks for growth beyond one-to-one mentoring, including structured ways to give back to the community that mentored you.
  • How can we improve accessibility and inclusivity across services?
    • Use inclusive language and provide clear explanations in calls and opportunities to lower the barrier to entry.
    • Develop bespoke training pathways tailored to different communities.
  • What engagement models can we adopt to encourage users to share knowledge and collaborate?
    • Support early-career researchers in leading multi-disciplinary events that address specific challenges.
    • Create a list of open research problems that can be tackled using HPC. Prizes can be awarded every few years to mark progress towards these challenges!

Check out the WHPC Chapters & Affiliates GitHub Repository to learn more about this event and how to recreate it for yourself!

It’s really important to keep these challenges fresh in our minds so solutions are central to our future development.

(Next time, we’ll bring actual 🎂 to fuel the discussions!)

Written by: Eleanor Broadway