Adéu, Barcelona.

Well, I’m writing this from back home in Norway after a great summer in Barcelona! This time, I’ve decided not to write so much hard scientific stuff as before. For that, I refer back to my two previous posts one on the basics of the project and AI and another specifically on Deep Q-Learning, as well as direct you to the final report of my project which will soon available on the Summer of HPC website under final reports 2017.

Overall, it’s been a great summer. You get to see a different city in a completely different way when you stay there for 2 months, working, than you do when you’re just visiting. Moreover, SoHPC is a great way of getting experience with a different field than your own. Working hard in a different area for just two months, gives you a whole new skill set. In Edinburgh, I do physics and maths, whilst in Barcelona I used a lot of my maths knowledge for functional analysis to get a deeper understanding in deep learning and other algorithms. I used my knowledge from statistical mechanics and probability theory to learn a lot of new things to understand Monte Carlo methods and their proofs. I was able to see first hand the similarities between optimization in algorithms, and physics in general. Moreover, I shared an office with people working on Monte Carlo algorithms, the other people working on the crowd simulation came from computer graphics, and I often worked on a desktop in the same room as the programming models group!

Work

We got some nice preliminary results using Python, and have started the quest into transforming this into C++ and CUDA, i.e mixed CPU and GPU, heterogeneous clusters as we say. For results, I’ll just refer to my video below, and the final report which will soon be out and available through the Summer of HPC website under final reports 2017.

I realise I could have spoken a bit faster in the video, and actually, letting YouTube speed up by 1.25 works reasonably well! The videos subtitles aren’t perfect, but work alright. It tends to write research when I say tree search.

Pictures from Barcelona

I’ll skip all the touristic stuff we all know so well from Barcelona and focus on the less common things. The art expo was a one off thing, the concert hall is Palau de la Musica Catalana, the picture from the train is close to Premia de Mar, and for the festival you can read Anton’s blog post Baptism of Fire.