The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Authors: Eleanor Broadway (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC)), Oscar Seip (Software Sustainability Institute (SSI)), Karina Pešatová (IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center), Bryan Johnston (NICIS (South Africa)), Scott Callaghan (Statewide California Earthquake Center, University of Southern California (USC)), Julia Mullen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lincoln Laboratory)
Abstract: Effective outreach is key to growing and diversifying the HPC community by engaging everyone from students and researchers to policymakers and the public. Yet many organizations face challenges developing or sustaining their outreach efforts, especially without dedicated staff or resources. This session aims to ease already heavy workloads by showcasing practical ways to reinvent, reuse, and repurpose existing HPC outreach materials to meet diverse needs. Participants will leave with a ready-to-use strategy for adapting outreach, lowering the barrier to participation and contributing to a growing global knowledge base that supports more inclusive and impactful HPC outreach efforts into the future.
Long Description: Outreach is essential for growing and diversifying the HPC community by communicating the importance of our research to broader audiences. Since most people don’t directly encounter HPC in their daily lives, effective outreach is key to increasing the profile of HPC 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 (primary through post-grad), 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 must be adaptable, inclusive and designed to meet people where they are, whilst still inspiring them to engage and learn more.
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. Luckily, the HPC outreach ecosystem is already rich with creative and impactful activities, but many of these are developed by individual centres to meet a specific goal or context, such as hosting a local science fair. With thoughtful adaptation and robust guidance, many of these existing resources can be reused and repurposed to serve the broader HPC community. This session aims to address this by exploring practical strategies to adapt and reuse existing outreach activities so that all centres, regardless of size or outreach experience, can more effectively engage diverse audiences.
Since 2018, many outreach-focused sessions have run at SC, ISC and others to help build a more collaborative and coordinated HPC outreach ecosystem. While earlier sessions in this series concentrated on developing new outreach materials, recent sessions have increasingly focused on improving existing activities and strengthening our science communication. At SC24, we explored how to adapt communication styles to engage audiences with varying levels of familiarity with HPC. Participants left with a flexible framework that could be applied to present the same piece of research in different formats tailored to each audience. For SC25, we plan to not only look at how we communicate, but how we can reinvent, reuse and repurpose existing outreach activities. The session will be practical and hands-on where participants leave with a ready-to-use strategy which tailors any outreach activity to their own contexts and needs.
We welcome all who are engaged in or curious about HPC outreach - whether you’re a seasoned practitioner, a first-time contributor, student, teacher or anyone in between - to attend and share in the conversation. The ability to adapt communication and engagement activities to suit specific contexts is a vital skill for anyone involved in public engagement, education, or community-facing work. Join the growing HPC outreach community, share, learn, and leave with new tools to expand the impact of your outreach.