HPC-LEAP at the Mediterranean Science Festival

(Contributed by Srijit Paul)

The Mediterranean Science Festival took place on 27-30 April 2017 at the Old Port Square in Limassol, a beautiful port city in Cyprus. It is a national outreach event for celebrating science, technology and innovation in Cyprus. Aurora, Simone and myself represented HPC-LEAP in this event with an interactive exhibition entitled “High Performance Computing Simulations in Physics” to showcase some of our work on lattice quantum chromodynamics to the wider public.

The day of our exhibition was hosted (29 April 2017) kicked off quite early, at 8am, as we gathered to embark towards Limassol. With all our equipment, posters and gadgets, I was tucked in the car with Aurora and Simone, with Stelios from CaSToRC driving us there.

By the time we arrived, the area of the exhibition was flooded with science enthusiasts from all age groups, and everyone was bustling with lots of energy to start explaining science to people. We had a lot of audience gathering up around our booth, impressed by the cool visualization of our simulations.

 Simone and Aurora discussing their work with students

We were pleasantly surprised by the abilities of young minds from age group of 12-15, so patiently listening to our explanations and asking questions. Along with the simulations we had a small hands-on demonstration of the Monte-Carlo integration, which is a crucial component of our work. Here people were asked to put dots in a box in any way they wanted, and from that we would give them an estimate of π. This gave them an idea of how probability works, and what high statistics means.

Srijit explaining Monte Carlo integration to high school students