Jiří Blahoš

My name is Jiří Blahoš. Currently I am 23 years old, and I live in Ostrava – the third largest city in the Czech Republic, located on the east side of the country. My hobbies include sports (tennis, biking, basketball, swimming), music, chess, video games, programming and mathematics. I mentioned math as a last one, but it’s definitely not the least important one. Around the age of 16, I started to be more and more interested in mathematical stuff, I studied ahead, experimented with various things. And this hasn’t left me until now.

I started studying mathematics at VŠB – Technical university of Ostrava at the age of 19. It also included programming lectures, and I took a major interest in that as well. The year later, I got employed at Ingeteam a.s. company, located close to my school, where I helped out with creating and implementing models for heating furnaces in metallurgy. At the age of 22 I finished the bachelor degree. It was therefore natural to apply for Summer Of HPC. I saw it as a chance to improve my programming skills, learn more about high performance computing, discover new mathematical approaches, meet new people and see new places.

During Summer Of HPC, I will work in ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing), located in Dublin. My project is to work with a mathematical model, provided by ICHEC, which simulates so called shallow water equations. These equations simply describe the physics of water. Shallow water relates to the usage of these equations – they are aimed for situations of “flat areas”, i.e. where the horizontal size is far exceeding the vertical size. This includes beach waves, ocean underwater flows (depth of the ocean is still small, compared to the surface area of it), rivers, channels, atmospheric flows, etc.

Specifically, I have two main tasks. The first is to visualise the output of the provided model, so it’s easy for everyone to see, in a nice form, what is the result of all those calculations behind. The second task is to parallelise the code of the model. That means to adjust it in a way so it can make use of the power hidden inside modern processing clusters or supercomputers. If done well, this adjustment can speed up the computation multiple times, which, in return, allows us to solve far more complex tasks in the same time. And this is, I would say, the main purpose of using these high performance computers.