Mircea Simionica

Mircea Simionica

Mircea Simionica is 24 years old and he is originally from Romania but has been living in Italy since he was 12 years old. He is currently studying for his Masters in Quantitative Finance at Bocconi University in Milan. His academic interests are orientated towards financial engineering, in particular, the pricing and hedging of derivatives securities. During his Bachelor’s degree he had the opportunity to collaborate to mixed integer and stochastic programming projects, so he also developed an interest in optimization.

He heard about the Summer of HPC through Cineca, the Italian computing center. He decided to apply in order to strengthen his programming skills, since his studies don’t directly involve it. He was selected for the Parallel boundary point method project, hosted by the Faculty of information studies in Novo Mesto, Slovenia. His task will be to write a parallel version of an existing Matlab code. He is really pleased to have been chosen for this project since it might relate to his Masters thesis as well.

Outside university, his main hobbies are swimming and Rubik’s cubes. He had been swimming competitively for two years, but eventually had to give up because of other commitments, mainly university. As for the Rubik’s cube, he enjoys taking part in official competitions and his favorite event is blindfolded cubing.

He is excited to be a part of the SoHPC and hopes to get practical knowledge out of it. Parallel computing is still under development in the financial services industry but hopefully it will become more and more popular due to a rising tsunami of data. He hopes he can apply all the experiences he will gain during the summer into his field.