Cardiff University Hosts Successful 'Sustainable Reality' HPC and AI Workshop
30 October 2026
Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff (ARCCA) was delighted to host the Sustainable Reality workshop on Friday, October 2, 2026, at the Abacws Building.
Delivered in collaboration with High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions provider Alces Flight, the event brought together students, researchers, and tech enthusiasts to explore hands-on, energy-conscious practices in supercomputing.
The workshop provided attendees with direct, practical insights into how modern HPC and AI operations can actively reduce their carbon footprint while maintaining high-efficiency processing power.
"Something extremely unique, and anyone interested in what is behind AI should try out a workshop."
The event saw broad engagement across the university achieving the second-highest attendance rate relative to registrations across the entire regional tour. In addition to pre-registered participants, several enthusiastic walk-in students joined on the day increasing the total to around 45 students in attendance.
The diverse cohort spanned discipline areas including:
- Mechanical, electrical, electronic, and medical engineering
- Chemistry, computer science, data science, AI, and cybersecurity
- Sustainable energy and environment studies
The event also hosted members of the Cardiff Dragons, who utilised the session to collaborate ahead of their efforts to represent Cardiff University at the upcoming CIUK26 Supercomputing Student Cluster Competition.
During the workshop, participants tackled practical HPC and AI exercises, including running job configurations and exploring computational benchmarking with the Mandelbrot Set.
"It is an insightful, hands-on event that shows you how sustainable practices can be applied directly to high-performance computing without losing processing power. You get to see real-world tools in action, network with industry professionals, and learn how tech operations are actively reducing their carbon footprint."
Feedback gathered from the session underscored a strong appetite among students for further HPC and AI engagements, hands-on hardware interplay, and undergraduate research opportunities in computational science.
ARCCA looks forward to building on this momentum to offer further training, workshops, and student-focused HPC and AI initiatives in the near future and hopes to run the event again in the Spring of 2027. You can review post-event materials and benchmarks from the tour in the shared Mandelbrot Set Results Folder.