Post summary image


At the end of March, CAKE joined researchers, developers, and HPC professionals from across the UK at the ARCHER2 Celebration of Science 2026 event in Edinburgh.

ARCHER2 is the UK’s national supercomputing service, supporting world-class research across academia and industry in the UK. Alongside delivering large-scale HPC capability, ARCHER2 also supports training, software sustainability, collaboration, and community development across the UK research computing ecosystem.

Spread across two days, the Celebration of Science brought the community together to showcase the research enabled by ARCHER2, while also looking ahead to the future of digital research infrastructure in the UK. With ARCHER2 currently scheduled to retire in November, discussions throughout the event reflected on both its impact and what comes next for the UK’s national supercomputing service.

Sharing CAKE with the community

Throughout the event, CAKE hosted a booth where attendees could learn more about the network, our activities, and opportunities to get involved. It was fantastic to meet so many members of the community and to hear about your work!

We also presented a poster and delivered a lightning talk as part of the Digital Research Landscape – Projects, Skills and Resources session. This session focused on the people, training, and infrastructure supporting digital research across the UK.

During the talk, we highlighted how CAKE activities help navigate this landscape, build connections across institutions, and support knowledge exchange through funding opportunities. The talk was presented by Eleanor Broadway (CAKE co-I), who later joined a panel discussion on the digital research landscape chaired by Nick Brown (CAKE PI).

Building the dRTP Landscape

On the Friday, the first meeting of the dRTP Landscape working group co-located with the ARCHER2 celebration of science took place. The overarching objective of this working group is to develop and maintain a database describing roles, skills, and training related to digital Research Technical Professionals (“the dRTP landscape”) to serve as a reference resource for the community.

There has been significant work done so far, with the next step being to curate the raw data that has been collected and ensure that it is of benefit.

If you are interested in contributing to this effort, we would love to hear from you.

Highlights from the event

  • Invited talks: a variety of talks from the invited speakers highlighting their impactful research using ARCHER2.
  • Poster programme: a platform for the ARCHER2 community to present and discuss their successes delivered on ARCHER2 through the lightning talks and the poster session.
  • Keynote: the keynote was given by Professor Mark Parsons, Director of EPCC.
  • Panel Session: focusing on key topics for the ARCHER2 and UK research community.
  • ARCHER2 User Forum: learn about the latest service updates and engage directly with the ARCHER2 team.
  • Diversity Session: an interactive session to discuss the equality, diversity and inclusion challenges related to the delivery of HPC services.