Aleksander Wennersteen

Magical Norwegian giant with tiny Greek girl.

You’re like a magical giant
-Dimitra

I’m 23 years old and in my third year of the five year MPhys in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. This summer, I will be participating in the Summer of HPC, based at the Barcelona Supercomputing center.

Originally from Norway, I couldn’t tell you the precise reason I decided to follow the thousand year old Norwegian tradition of conquering the British isles, nevertheless, it is going according to plan. I shall finish my ancestors work!

Academically, my interests range from the abstract corners of Mathematics, through Physics to Computer Science. This is the reason I have decided to leave the safe cocoon of theoretical physics and maths to go to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) to learn more about Deep Learning (DL) and visualisation. My project title is “Monte Carlo and Deep Learning Methods for Enhancing Crowd Simulation“.

I chose to participate in the PRACE SoHPC program both due to the cool project I got, and the prospect of meeting more  people from around Europe. We are representing most of Europe, from Finland to Spain, and the UK to Greece. The main point separating SoHPC from other Europe wide summer programs, is the wide variety of fields we are coming from. There are Naval Engineers, Computer scientists, Chemists, Physicists, Mathematicians and so on. In academia, you seldom meet people from such a wide range of fields, so this is truly an amazing experience.

Apart from my wide academic interest, I consider myself an avid traveler and hiker. Below are some of my more recent highlights that were pictured.

Walked up this random hill near Munich for an hour or so, then we found this view!

Actually, this was taken just a 15 minute walk from one of the main north south roads in Norway!