When life gives you lemons, make lemonade

“Take a look at this, it may interest you…”. I found these words in an email my thesis supervisor sent me last year. Attached to that there was a link, it brought me to the homepage of SoHPC. I started reading about it and I felt more and more intrigued the more I went on. After some thinking, I decided not to participate but I promised myself to try the next year. And that’s exactly what I did, even if things didn’t go completely as planned… To cut the story short, I didn’t expect to write this blogpost in my hometown here in Italy, after a week of remote learning. But, as someone would say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Wait, I still haven’t introduced myself! I’m Roberto, a last-year student of the master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. But I think that what I do is more interesting than who I am: High-Performance Computing is my field, and I take all the opportunities I find to explore it more. My master thesis is an example of this: I’m working on Fault mitigation and tolerance for MPI applications. If you are interested in knowing more about it here you can find a research proposal that describes the topic and, if not yet satisfied, feel free to contact me, I will be glad to talk about it.

I decided to work on fault tolerance also here at SoHPC. The project bases on Charm++, a parallel programming framework which already features fault tolerance. We (me and my mate Petar, also check out his blog) will have to improve the fault tolerance mechanism present, adding more features. Here you can find more details about it if you are interested.

Well, you may be interested in what I do outside High-Performance Computing. In my free time, I play videogames and watch TV mostly. Some evenings I play board games with some of my friends, and we always have a great time. I always try to squeeze some time to do some physical exercise to keep myself fit, and sometimes I even go running. I’m preparing for a running competition organized by my university: 10km distance across the streets of Milan, and I want to improve my last year’s performance of 56 minutes.

I’m not a big fan of social networks, but I use GitHub and LinkedIn. If you don’t want to miss anything about what I do, feel free to add me. Moreover, you can find a lot of projects I worked on in the past on GitHub, some of them may interest you. Those explore a wide variety of fields, from functional programming to hardware design, from High-Performance Computing to some strange telegram bot, so I doubt you won’t find anything interesting…

That’s all about me I think, I’ll just attach a picture of my hometown, Verbania. It’s a small city on the shore of Lake Maggiore, in the northern part of Italy. It’s not Vienna nor Edinburgh, but it’s still a beautiful place.