Shyam Mohan says “Hello World!”

Hello everyone!! I am Shyam Mohan and the above picture is a fair reflection of how I felt when I was selected for this year’s PRACE Summer of HPC program (if you still don’t get it, absolutely thrilled!!!). I come from the extremely sunny climes of Chennai, a metropolis in the southern coast of India. Well then, how did I end up here you ask? The story begins in the tiny island nation of Bahrain, where I was born and did my schooling till tenth grade. As a kid, I used to be fascinated by puzzles and numbers and the wonderful little(!) world of mathematics itself. However, I shifted to Chennai after my tenth grade and did my final couple of years of schooling there. This is where I also picked up a fascination for gears, levers, crankshafts, cars and anything mechanical. Hence, I decided to do my undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering in Chennai itself. During my time toiling hard in the mechanical workshop of my institute, I stumbled upon the world of engineering simulations and then I thought ” Why sweat it out doing manual experiments in the blazing sun while you can do the same in the cozy confines of my room using nothing but a computer? ” . This was when I slowly deviated from hardcore mechanics to computational mechanics. I am now pursuing a Masters degree in Simulation Sciences at RWTH Aachen, Germany. This course introduced me to the magical world of scientific computing and in particular “High Performance Computing”. Inevitably, word about this program was doing the rounds in our WhatsApp groups and I decided to give it a shot. And the rest as they say is history!

High Performance Computing 1 – 0 COVID

Our training week was scheduled to happen in Vienna. Being an avid traveller, I was super excited to be able to visit a new city and interact with like-minded students and experts in the field and get to experience a different culture. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic meant that this could not be conducted in real time. But hey, who said we couldn’t simulate this virtually? Computing is something that can continue regardless of such circumstances and our tight-knit SoHPC community can certainly attest to that! I had a great time during the training week learning a lot about how coding can be done using supercomputers in a parallel manner. Also, the sports and yoga sessions in between had me catching my breath a bit!! As they say, a healthy body leads to a healthy mind!

I will be working on an exciting project on parallelisation of plasma kinetic code at the LECAD Laboratory, Ljubljana, Slovenia. I am really thrilled to find out how my project progresses over the coming days. As my mentor says, “The sky’s the limit!”. If you would like to know more about the project and my experiences dealing with it, please stay tuned for my next posts!!!

Until then, this is Shyam signing off!!!