Art meets science at the UK Data Access Centre

A new artwork for EPCC's Somerville research cloud honours the cloud service's role in the groundbreaking Legacy Survey of Space and Time and plays homage to its namesake.

The mural was created by Aaron Ballantyne, a multimedia designer working at EPCC. It is inspired by one of the First Look images released by the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in June 2025 and features a portrait of Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780-1872).

Somerville, a Scottish mathematician and astronomer, was a pioneer for women in science. Deemed one of the finest minds in history, as a polymath she brought science into the public view through her book The Connection of the Physical Sciences and worked into her nineties.

Based in Edinburgh, Somerville is a high-performance, data intensive storage service ideal for survey astronomy. It hosts a number of science services, including two key aspects LSST:UK contributions:

• The UK Independent Data Access Centre, which provides three different user interfaces capable of managing hundreds of concurrent queries on the LSST data.

• The Lasair Community Broker – a UK-developed broker that will receive around 10 million Rubin alerts every night in real time to enable scientists to make science.

Read the full story on the EPCC website