Enes Çankırı

When I was a kid, we only had my brother’s computer at home. I was 5 years old and I was only allowed to play with the computer for 15-20 minutes every day. Then one day, my brother asked me “What do you want to be in future?” and I answered “Computer Engineer! So, I can play with the computer whenever I want.” and this is how a dream started. I wanted to be a Computer Engineer since childhood.

On the Hallstatt Skywalk

My name is Enes, I’m from the beautiful country of the Republic of Turkey. I just graduated from my BSc in Computer Engineering. I’m planning to proceed with a Master’s degree and PhD outside of Turkey. But, apparently I’m not the only with the same plan, so finding a scholarship for a Master’s degree is challenging. Consequently, I’m planning to skip a Master’s degree and begin with a PhD directly because it is easier to find funding.

I see myself as a lifelong student. Because, I have a hunger to learn new programming tricks and I really enjoy programming as a hobby. I quickly get bored when I work on the same thing for a long time, so I have looked into different areas for years. Also, I love competitive programming contests, hackathons and have won prizes in these. Until the previous year, I was working in web technologies as a full stack developer. I’m experienced in many web frameworks and different languages such as: Spring, Django, Node.JS, ASP.NET and so on. I then started a Machine Learning course by Andrew-Ng and that course changed my future plans. Currently, I’m focused on Machine Learning and Neural Networks. I also play with Blockchain kind technologies in my free time.

Last semester, I took a Parallel Computing course at my university by our tutor Dr. Mete Akdoğan. We learned about memory architectures, libraries such as OpenMP and MPI, Big Data concepts and so on. We also used a cluster for the first time, the cluster of the National High Performance Computing Center of Turkey (UHeM) which is the PRACE partner in Turkey. Our tutor also told us about the PRACE and Summer of HPC programme. I then started to check the available projects and saw some which were related to machine learning. I was really excited when I applied and while waiting for the decision. SoHPC is a really good opportunity to meet new friends from new cultures and meet future scientists, to visit at least 2 countries (for most of us) and work on great projects which are designed to teach us many things.

I was surprised by the program of the training week in Edinburgh – they were really prepared and everything was on right track. There were many exercises for everybody from different programming levels. Even though I followed a similar course at my university, I learned new things in Edinburgh. But, my favorite part was walking to Arthur’s Seat.

On the Arthur’s Seat with Nazmiye and Zheqi

Last but not least, I’m very glad to be in this program. Currently, I’m working on implementing an easy machine learning K-Means algorithm with Global Address Space Programming Interface (GASPI). Last week I implemented it, then parallelised it with MPI and currently I’m trying to figure it out GASPI implementation GPI-2. So far, I enjoyed my project and learning new technologies.

I recommend Summer of HPC to everyone who wants to learn more about HPC and meet awesome people !