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One of the occupational hazards of leading the CAKE Placements & Visits work package is that I’m not actually allowed to apply for funding myself… Which is a shame, because every time I speak to someone about the scheme I come away with another idea for how I would use it.

So, I’m sharing some of those ideas! Please steal them.

First, what are the CAKE Placements & Visits?

The CAKE Placements & Visits provide flexible funding for in-person or remote placements and visits for the UK DRI community. They are designed to help you build new collaborations and strengthen existing ones, creating opportunities for you to share what you know, learn from others and explore new ideas. In particular, we are keen to fund two-way knowledge exchange and shared research development where both parties benefit.

For example, you could take a week embedded in another research group, bring a new perspective to your work to explore a new research direction, get a virtual collaboration with an international partner off the ground, or attend an event, community meeting or workshop.

These are intentionally designed to be flexible and support opportunities that often fall through the cracks of traditional placement schemes. So, the opportunities are kind of endless!

Idea 1: Borrow someone’s expertise

Every research group, institution or workplace has something that they do really well. This could be in how they’ve implemented a workflow, the communication style across different teams or collaborations, or unique technical skills. An embedded placement would give you the chance to spend dedicated time learning with them: working alongside, asking questions and understanding how they do what they do. At the same time, you could share your own expertise and both groups would come away with new ideas.

One opportunity I’d jump at is learning how other HPC centres approach performance testing and optimisation. Through my work in the ARCHER2 support team at EPCC, I’ve helped develop testing workflows and optimise user software, but there’s no single “right” way to do this. Different centres have developed different practices, tools and ways of supporting researchers. Spending time embedded with another team would be a really natural way to learn from their experience while sharing our own. Afterwards, I’d invite them to EPCC so we could continue the exchange, compare what we’d learned, and identify ways to improve both our services.

Idea 2: Making the most of conference connections

The reality of modern working is that online collaborating is essential. We are always meeting over Zoom or Slack, then briefly catch up at conferences. At those conferences, I usually come away with loads and loads of ideas, but not a lot of time to do anything with them. A placement or visit could be used to provide the dedicated time needed to explore ideas and start to implement them.

For example, I’ve been involved with a series of Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at ISC and SC that bring together people working in HPC outreach and public engagement. Every year we generate some really great ideas, but the conferences are busy, and before you know it everyone has gone home to different countries, in different timezones, and collaboration becomes stalled.

I’d love to have the time and funding to visit the BoF team, bring a small group together for a few days to design the outreach activities we have discussed, start developing materials and workflows for collaboration, and leave with resources the whole community could use. The CAKE Placements & Visits could help fund this, either myself travelling or them coming to visit me.

Idea 3: Upskilling to support my existing work

One of the things I enjoy about working in HPC is that I’m constantly learning something new. Every new project can mean a new workflow, language, software stack or research questions. A lot of that learning happens on the job, working towards deadlines at the same time. But, there is often a skill that is a little too far outside my comfort zone where a few days of focused learning would make a huge difference. So, in this way, a placement or visit can also be about deliberately investing time to become a better collaborator.

For example, I might use the funding to attend an in-person training course or spend time with a group that has expertise already. I know I wouldn’t become an expert overnight, but I would be able to build enough understanding that I can speed-up my contributions to my existing projects, bringing skills back, sharing what I learnt and maybe improving how the entire group works.

Idea 4: Supporting the communities that support us

Not all of the work that benefits our research community happens as part of our day job. Many of us volunteer time to professional societies or community groups or open source projects. Often these passions benefit from finding new connections, learning from experience, and finding dedicated time to work on things. But, volunteer work can really struggle for this time and funding!

For me, one of those communities is Women in HPC (WHPC). Like many volunteer-led organisations, it depends on people finding time around their “real” jobs, so there are always ideas we’d love to pursue but struggle to dedicate uninterrupted time to. I’d love to plan a visit so that rather than squeezing meetings into evenings across multiple time zones, we could spend focused time developing resources, planning new initiatives, improving our mentoring programmes, etc.

Although that work sits outside my formal role, it absolutely benefits it. Stronger professional communities lead to better collaborations and better support for the people working in HPC. And, the skills, networks and resources I’ve developed feed directly back into the environment I work in. I think this is one of the strengths of the CAKE Placements & Visits, as it that valuable knowledge exchange doesn’t only happen within research projects. It’s often wider!

Idea 5: Making the time, whilst staying at home

Sometimes the biggest barrier isn’t the distance, but the time! There are plenty of reasons why travelling isn’t always practical: caring responsibilities, teaching, accessibility needs or simply busy schedules. But that doesn’t mean the collaboration isn’t valuable.

A virtual placement can help to carve out dedicated time to work with collaborators. Having clear goals, regular check-ins and a reason to protect that time would make it much easier to move an idea from “we should do this some day” to actually making progress. The flexibility to support both in-person and virtual collaborations means more people can benefit, and more good ideas have a chance to happen.

Now it’s your turn!

Hopefully these ideas have sparked a few of your own. I feel that the best placements and visits are the ones that don’t quite fit anywhere else: collaboration you want to explore, expertise you want to learn from, or community projects that need a little dedicated time.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I wonder if they’d fund…”, then it’s probably worth asking, we’re always happy to chat!

By Eleanor Broadway (e.broadway@epcc.ed.ac.uk)