The November 2024 HPC-SIG meeting was hosted by the University of East Anglia, bringing members of the UK HPC community together for a two-day event combining technical exchange, strategic discussion, and facility tours.
Day 1 opened with welcomes from UEA and the HPC-SIG Chair, followed by host and technical presentations covering a wide range of current developments across UK research computing. Talks included an early look at JADE 2.5 at Oxford, the deployment of SSH certificate-based access on Isambard-AI and Isambard 3, the design of a new hyperconverged research environment at UCL, and CASIS, a carbon-aware, CI/CD-driven approach to software installation and environment module management. The afternoon concluded with guided tours of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and UEA’s historic 1960s data centre, providing both technical and some cultural fun to the meeting
Day 2 focused on community discussion and shared experience. A fishbowl panel encouraged broad participation before the programme split into parallel technical and management streams. The technical stream featured lightning talks on local scratch space on HPC systems, Slurm migration, package indexing, and network performance measurement across UK universities. In parallel, the management and strategic stream explored challenges around new data-centre design, funding landscapes, and approaches to HPC cost recovery, building on discussions from earlier HPC-SIG meetings.
The meeting concluded with shared notices and informal discussion over lunch. The event highlighted ongoing collaboration across the UK HPC community and reinforced HPC-SIG’s role as a forum for exchanging practical experience, strategic insight, and emerging best practice. The Society thanks the University of East Anglia and all contributors for hosting a successful and engaging meeting.