Three groups of students and teachers visited NCI in January as part of the National Youth Science Forum (NYSF) and the National Science Teachers Summer School. They all enjoyed tours of NCI's data hall and plant room, as well as a variety of activities including an introduction to coding, a look at the CT equipment used in visualisations made at NCI, and a preview of the mapping capabilities of NCI's large data collections.
NCI's expert staff also got to talk to the visitors about their careers in high-performance computing and the paths they took that brought them to the field. The students got to learn about the research going on in their favourite areas of science, and the computational basis underpinning it. For many of them, this was their first visit to a large scale data centre, and their first time seeing the technologies and infrastructure making it all possible.
We were very pleased to welcome the teachers and students to NCI as part of their summer of science at ANU. It is always a pleasure to meet with the NYSF students, we look forward to their continuing interest in science, and hope that one day soon they will become users of the facility themselves!
