About (‘Victor Njenga Muya’);

Hi there!

My name is Victor Njenga Muya, and I am participating in this year’s edition of the Summer of High-Performance Computing (SoHPC) research internship. This blog post is the first in a series where I will be sharing what I am learning, my experience, and the project I am working on.

Background

Currently 23 years of age, I was born and raised in Kenya, but I moved to Turkey four years ago to study Electrical & Electronics Engineering at Osmangazi University. My interest in programming computers to solve problems started with a C programming class and a robotics project I worked on during my first semester at the university. Consequently, I set out to learn more and more about programming and computing.

I learned about PRACE Summer of HPC through a friend who participated in the program last year. The program appealed to me because it avails training and resources for High-Performance Computing to university students, for them to solve complex, interesting problems in a 2-month research project in the summer. I was intrigued.

When I learned that the applications for the 2022 edition of the Summer of HPC were open sometime in March this year, I sent in my application. And in mid-May, I received an email informing me that I had been selected to do one of the 22 projects available this year.

Project 2201

I am working on Project 2201: Leveraging High-Performance Computing to test the quality and scalability of a genetic analysis tool. The team at the Comparative Genomics Lab of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where I am conducting my research, is developing an algorithm, JLOH, that analyzes genome data to test for loss of heterozygosity (LOH). Under the supervision of Toni Gabaldón and Matteo Schiavinato, I will be testing the algorithm’s scalability and ability to handle different genetic and data properties using HPC. More information about the project is available here.

Training week

I am writing this fresh out of a rigorous virtual training week hosted at the University of Ljubljana’s LeCAD Lab where we learned about the various parallel and distributed computing tools such as MPI and OpenMP in addition to GPU programming using CUDA. The sessions were well structured and hands-on; we were allowed to program on the LeCAD Lab HPCFS Supercomputing cluster. This made the learning curve a little less steep and the training a bit fun. Moreover, I got to meet some of the program’s mentors and the other like-minded participants with whom I will be working for the next couple of weeks.

That is all I am going to share in today’s blog post. Feel free to leave any questions that you may have in the comment section below, and I will get back to you. Thank you for reading and see you in the next one!