Exploring The Captivating World Of High Performance Computing

Introduction

Hello everyone!
My name is Athanasios Kastoras (but I go by Thanos) and I am really excited about the opportunity I’ve been given, to participate in this year’s PRACE Summer of HPC. I will be working on Precision based differential checkpointing for HPC applications with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, but more about that later.

Who am I?

I was born on October 19th, 2001, in the city of Volos, Greece, where I was also raised, and now study. I loved maths from a young age, and I was curious about science, but I never got in touch with Computer Science and Programming until I went to University. When I entered the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Thessaly, I was seduced by the C programming language and later by the amazing hardware and computer architecture fields. Now I’ve just finished the second year of my studies and I’m already passionate about computational speed, software optimization, and HPC system programming. This is why I applied to the PRACE SoHPC program; because I believe this is the best starting point to begin my journey to the limitless world of high-end computing.

Some facts about me

• I love coding! Whether we talk about scripting or low-level programming, I can look at lines of code for hours and never be bored.
• I am a Linux enthusiast! In the last two years, I’ve switched between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, and Manjaro Linux distributions and I always love to experiment with new Operating Systems on my personal laptop.
• I practice Karate! Since the age of seven years old, I’ve been practicing Shotokan Karate. Until now, I’ve gained a black belt with a second Dan, many experiences, and exciting skills.
• I love camping and nature! I always look for a chance to spend time in nature and relax away from the fast city life.

My experience in SoHPC so far

Today, I’ve just finished the SoHPC training week. We learned many interesting things during the whole week, about the Python language in HPC, parallelizing C and Fortran code using OpenMP and MPI, and more importantly, we run experiment programs on an actual supercomputer. It is amazing to know that the code you wrote on your personal laptop is running on a supercomputer in Ireland just with the press of a button (actually the button was a script, but anyway).

The project I will be working on

During the summer I will be working on a project called precision-based differential checkpointing for HPC applications. I will be dealing with FTI, a library that helps programmers make HPC applications less vulnerable using four levels of checkpointing (i.e. storing the state of the execution to be restored in case of an error). Levels that cover a larger amount of errors are more expensive than those that cover more simple errors, thus it is necessary to find the best balance between them. Our goal will be to implement differential checkpointing in FTI and explore precision-based differential checkpointing. Sounds confusing? During the following blog posts, I will be presenting the project in more detail, but no prior knowledge is needed to understand it.

Finally

I am really excited about this summer and so far it is going really well! Unfortunately, we weren’t able to travel to the sites we will be working with, but I will try to make the best out of this experience. Do you have any experiences like this? If yes, feel free to share your experience or anything you want to discuss in the comment section.

Finally, I hope you enjoyed my post and found it interesting. More posts are coming, so please follow me on my LinkedIn account if you want to be updated.

Thanos