Aitor López Sánchez

From the theory to the practice.

Hello, my name is Aitor Lopez, I am 23 years old and I come from Spain. I’m a recent graduate student in Mathematics and Computer Engineering and I’m starting a master’s degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning, because I want to combine the mathematical potential with the latest computer technology that mixes both.

I consider myself a person who likes theoretical sciences, such as abstract mathematics and computer science. But I feel a weakness towards problem-solving, so I like to participate in different algorithm competitions, like google hash code or hackathons. I think that facing great challenges in this type of competition can help improve your qualities and bring out the best in you.

For all this, I want to learn about HPC to be able to accelerate different algorithms and thus complement the theory with the practice. To achieve this I’m going to participate in the PRACE Summer of HPC, in the High-Performance Quantum Fields project in Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany. In this project, I’m going to run several algorithms in quantum fields in different hardware architectures to measure their performance.

SoHPC has already started and we have successfully completed the training week, which was conducted online due to COVID. During this week, we learned the basics about HPC and parallel programming techniques, like MPI or OpenMP on CPUs and on CUDA on GPUs. We have also had the opportunity to visit the VSC supercomputer infrastructure available in Vienna online, where we have executed our exercises. And meet many students like me who are looking to learn new things and overcome new challenges. The only thing left to do is to put them into practice in the project.

If you want to know more about me or about what I’m going to do, don’t forget to check my blog weekly. See you soon!