Ladies and Gentlemen, This is HPC

It is a great pleasure for me to tell how I feel about training week and the organization itself before jumping into the technical details of my project. The first day of training week was like a great orientation day, in which you listened to great presentations as well as meeting peers with lots of chatting. In my opinion, it is so important to provide everything to make us do not feel the limitations of the online meeting. It was a lovely introductory day to the program where each part (both students and organizers) had a chance to reflect their expectations. The effort PRACE gave to make the meeting as interactive as possible is so respectful. The utilization of ZOOM meeting was very good. We jumped to the breakout rooms and met with peers and then came back to the main room and followed presentations again. Moreover, plenty of surveys and a visual collaboration workspace MURAL is used to make us involve better. The rest of the training weeks were composed of MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA reviews. Apart from the great content, when I looked into the schedule, optional stretching and yoga sessions put a smile on my face. Slides and hands-on exercises were well prepared and almost no pre-knowledge is assumed.

Later in the week, I met with my teammate and supervisor. Busenur Aktilav is a senior Computer Engineering student in IYTE and Buket Benek Gürsoy is a computational scientist in the Irish Centre for High-End Computing. We are all Turkish and coming from similar cultures allows sharing more things and I am looking forward to working with them! In the group meeting, our supervisor introduced us to Kay, the supercomputer that we are going to work on. I previously worked on Gandalf, the supercomputer at Sabanci University. When I switched to Gandalf from my old loyal laptop, I was amazed by the properties of Gandalf. However, now when I compare it with Kay, I see the adjective “super” is a very subjective word. Kay is the biggest computer that I have ever worked on! Hopefully, at the end of our project “GPU acceleration of Breadth-First Search algorithm in applications of Social Networks” I can tell “This is the real HPC” and the adjective “real” will not be as subjective as “super”.