João Guerreiro, a participant of SoHPC2021!

Greetings everyone! I’m João Guerreiro, 24 years old from Portugal and am currently finishing my Master’s degree in Physics Engineering at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. My academic interests have always been towards the fields of Mathematics and Physics, with the addition of Computer Science when I had contact with it in college. After breaking the “barrier” of understanding the for loop and discovered the numerous applications and possibilities of Computer Science, I knew it was something that I could not leave aside from my career.

I have heard about SoHPC from a close friend of mine, Miguel Guerreiro, Computer Scientist, who brought the idea of us applying together. Needless to say that the submission of our applications didn’t take long after taking a closer look at the projects. The SoHPC programme offers a great chance to learn and work with top notch institutions in such emerging and interesting topics. I was given the opportunity to embrace in project 2127 – “Maximizing data processing efficiency in the cloud, with a twist for Research Data Management” – of which I am very excited!

With the Internet being one of the most important developments of the 20th century, of which our lives are becoming more and more impractical without it, the innovation of cloud has made its mark. It has made possible, via the Internet, the storage of content, development of apps, the test of software without having to install them in our computers and much more. The project is being organized by SURF and it will give insight on how to handle storage for data processing in scientific research and how to apply them in cloud computing. Several cloud storage systems are to be tested in assessing and finding its best use cases.

So far, the training week has passed where several very useful tools have been explored whose topics focused on Python programming for HPC and parallel programming with OpenMP and MPI. I had the chance of meeting my project mentors that immediately put me at ease. They are showing to be very helpful in getting us acquainted with the topic. I feel great motivation for the weeks ahead and I am eager to learn more about this interesting project!

I would like to congratulate all of you and wish you the best of luck in this SoHPC adventure!