As our knowledge around how to become more sustainable within High Performance Computing (HPC) continues to grow the team at Alces Flight also understands that sustainability isn’t just about saving on power or optimising hardware. It’s also about making small but meaningful changes in the day-to-day. That’s why this year we decided that for major events from Supercomputing (SC) onwards one of the changes we’ll be making is reducing our conference ‘swag’ in favour of engaging with the HPC community through donations to global charities whose impact can (or is) benefitting from results coming out of supercomputing research.
A Simple Swap.
We worked with YEAH Laser of Bristol, UK to create tokens from their reclaimed acrylic which could be reused across our community engagements to participate in a simple voting system. Those who visit an Alces Flight booth or table at any major event from now onwards will have a chance to donate £1 of our funds towards one of the four charities we will be contributing to. As a reward participants are free to take from our sticker or pin selection, however, individuals are also free to opt out of any swag altogether.
Student Engagement.
We were also proud to have the students from the CIUK Cluster Challenge take our idea to the next level through earning tokens over their challenge period which they could donate to charity at the end of the event. This made our end of year fundraising hugely successful and brought a fun, social dimension to what can sometimes be a tough challenge. We want to thank this year’s teams for being so enthusiastic with their willingness to not only tackle some tough benchmarking, but also engage with attendees, vendors and coaches to ensure that plenty of donation tokens were won.
This Year’s Charities.
For 2022 are very pleased to have raised a total of £548 towards the following charities:
- WaterAid: The people of WaterAid are an international not-for-profit, determined to make clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene normal for everyone, everywhere within a generation.
- OneTreePlanted: The team at OneTreePlanted want to make it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees. Together we can restore forests, create habitat for biodiversity, and make a positive social impact around the world.
- BreastCancer.org: Their mission is to help people make sense of the complex medical and personal information about breast health and breast cancer, so they can make the best decisions for their lives.
- Doctors without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres): Are an international, medical humanitarian organisation working in more than 90 countries around the world.
We look forward to continuing this tradition and hopefully seeing more of these initiatives happening at other HPC events!