Let the Home Performance Computing begin

Prelude:

Greetings dear blog intruder, this blog belongs to Anssi from the northern forests of Finland. My home office for this summer will be in secluded Kuopio. At this point, I would like to rectify common fallacy; there are no polar bears in here.

The PRACE Summer of HPC (HPC actually stands for high-performance computing) consists of annually organized projects in different supercomputing centres around Europe. As I am always watchful about embracing new information on the mathematics-related things, it was an easy decision to apply for the SoHPC. 

Enigmatic problems emerging from all kinds of disciplines have always been intriguing for me. Such as statistical inverse problems which I’ve been studying in the computational physics department at Eastern-Finland university. Albeit this kind of problems often crack one’s head and diminish the remaining sanity, they also offer the dire moments of euphoria. Similar challenges arise when designing well-functioning HPC algorithms and protocols. 

I consider myself as a sloppy coder; nonetheless, it would be still nice to manifest computed results at times. From SoHPC, I expect to learn some basic concepts of HPC and to extend my programming toolkit for the future. Furthermore, there is also a hazard to be comprehending new neat stuff from physics/mathematics. 

The project under code name 2011 and the training week:

My projects organizer is the Jülich Research Centre in Germany for which I’ll be working remotely for the next seven weeks. The projects essence is the lattice discretization of Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD), which allows one to compute the behaviour of gluons and quarks by machinery (see https://summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu/high-performance-quantum-fields/). As the lattice tends to have an enormous amount of estimated parameters (e.g. colours and spins), the large scale parallel computing is harnessed to drastically reduce the computational time requirements.

So far, the SoHPC offered the training week for the participants in which some essential HPC concepts were introduced. Namely, how to use OpenMP, MPI and Cuda and how HPC architectures are often constructed. Overall, the training week was an enjoyable experience and had some refreshing daily embedded activities such as Yoga with professional (thanks to Cornelia, the yogi).   

Since the program is done remotely, I am not currently capable of providing any local views from Jülich. Instead, you can check out the Jülich blogs from the previous years. The plan is to publish sceneries from the vicinity of mine as quick as I get to outside.

To finalize the post, I would like to provide a few futile facts (someone could call these as opinions).

The best GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 GPU – Has served me well during the years, with a minimum amount of protests. 

The best juggling pattern: Mills mess (4 balls) – Fairly easy and splashy.

The best basis: Bell basis – Entanglement for everyone.

The best (prog) music composer: Steven Wilson – Dude just knows how to do amass the instruments.

The best type of graph: Markov random fields – I just like the approach.

The best paradox: Banach-Tarski paradox – Virtually, solves the worlds food shortage problem.

The best type of toothbrush head: One with medium-strong brushes – Works gently. 

The best type of book: Hardcover – Allows one to tap audible patterns.

Within the upcoming weeks, you can find about my progress via this blog. Also, check out Aitor’s blog, who is also working with the high-efficiency quantum fields project.

To keep things interactive, there’s brief juggling video below