Federico Sossai

I don’t remember exactly what I typed in the Google search bar that day in the middle of February, but one thing’s for sure: I came across the PRACE website and I’m glad I did. Not much time before I discovered that all the topics I’ve been putting all of my efforts into, converge to a single discipline, and this discipline is called HPC. Ah! Acronyms! Here we go again. So I immediately applied for Summer of HPC, the internship I was looking for without knowing.

Now let me introduce myself. My name is Federico Sossai, I’m an Italian Computer Engineering student at the University of Padua, currently at the last year of my Master’s degree. My main interests concern the software side of Computer Science such as algorithm design, analysis, optimization and high performance computing of course. I’m attracted by any form of computation in general but, as you probably have guessed, parallel computing is one of my favourite.

Personalities are anything but simple to be described so let me give you a hint: I love C programming. Just a few words to enclose so many aspects of my identity. I like to spend hours thinking, paying attention to little details, not taking anything for granted and doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

It’s not a matter of interest, it’s a matter of passion.

I live in a small town in the northeastern Italy of about 5,000 residents, which might not offer the same services as a metropolitan city (well, of course it doesn’t!), but we all know that every Con has its Pro: I can reach either the sea, the mountains or Venice in about an hour! I wasn’t expecting to spend this much time in here, but due to the lockdown my home has become my workplace, so let’s see what I will be working on besides playing electric guitar..

When it comes to big computing infrastructures it is not possible to keep everything in a shared memory fashion and that’s when distributed memory comes into play. This is what my project, named Improving performance with hybrid programming, is all about: learn how to efficiently mix MPI and OpenMP to get the best performance out of the VSC3 supercomputer (at Vienna Scientific Cluster), exploiting both shared and distributed memory architectures all in one software.

Now let’s hunt some GFlops!