The Durham HPC Days bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners to explore the frontiers of high-performance computing, data analysis, and scientific innovation. This year’s event ran from 15-19 June and CoSeC was invited to organise a session on “CoSeC Knowledge Exchange: HPC Across Computational Research Communities” which was scheduled for the afternoon of Wednesday 17 June.

The CoSeC session was organised and Chaired by Wei Wang, the CoSeC project lead for CCP-NTH, and brought together representatives from several Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) and High-End Computing (HEC) communities to discuss how high-performance computing (HPC) is used across different research domains. The session highlighted the diversity of HPC workloads supported by CoSeC, including turbulence, wave-structure interaction, molecular simulation, engineering modelling, and nuclear thermal hydraulics. The aim was to compare computational patterns across domains, identify shared challenges and opportunities, and gather community input to help inform future UK national HPC services beyond ARCHER2.

The session began with a presentation from CoSeC Director, Stephen Longshaw, who gave a quick overview of CoSeC and then spoke about HPC roles across the communities. He was followed by four short presentations from CoSeC team members Stefano Rolfo (CCP-Turbulence), Mayank Kumar (CCP-WSI), Tom Durrant (CCP5) and Wei Wang (CCP-NTH) who presented on the use of HPC in their respective communities.

The final part of the session was an interactive discussion session with the audience asked their opinions based on three questions:

• What is the biggest HPC challenge for your community at the moment?
• Which areas best describe your community’s HPC needs or bottlenecks?
• What is your recommendation for future UK national HPC services?

These questions provoked some interesting discussion and debate – and the results will be taken away by the CoSeC Programme Office and used to help shape future conversations with UKRI and the Research Councils.

We really enjoyed being involved in the HPC Days event, that has grown steadily over the last few years due to the hard work of the organisers at Durham, and have taken away a lot of interesting opinions and suggestions from our session. As always it was also great to be able to catch up in person with contacts and colleagues during the day.