All Aboard! Destination SoHPC!

Hi everyone! Even though I would like to greet you from the lovely city of Edinburgh, I greet you from another beautiful city Istanbul. I am Aybüke Özçelik. I am a graduate student in the Electronics and Communication Engineering Department at Izmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH), Turkey. I got my bachelor’s degree last year from the same department at IZTECH.

Ever since I know myself, I was always intrigued by the world around me, and I was always tried to understand. I set my curiosity and excitement on my environment as a beacon through my whole life, and that led me to engineering later on. In addition to my engineering education, I continue my excitement by taking many courses from sciences and reading articles. During my education period, I have been deeply interested in electro-optics, nanoscience, computational musicology, and computational biology.

One day, when I was analyzing with gene sets for a bioinformatics project, I complained to my friend because of the length of the processing time, and my friend said that learning parallel programming and processing with supercomputers could be the solution to this problem then he mentioned the Summer of HPC program (SoHPC). This conversation took place only a few hours before the deadline for applications. When I skimmed over the project announcement documents of the SoHPC, I saw the project “2114: Re-engineering and optimizing software for the discovery of gene sets related to disease”. What? Isn’t this project resemble the project that I am working on? (Ps: my project was a simple student project with much less extensive) I really loved this coincidence, even though I have not believed in omens or signs. With this thought in my mind and with great enthusiasm, I applied to this project. The moment, when I found out that I had been accepted from the project was one of the best moments in my academic life.

Before training week, a meeting was held by our project mentor Dr. By Mario Antoniotti. In this way, I had the opportunity to meet our co-mentor Pau Navarro, Dr. Antoniotti, and my last problem bender project partner İrem. At the meeting, firstly we got to know each other, then our coordinators talked about the project and mentioned their expectations from us. After the meeting, I was sure that to be a part of this project team and the Summer of HPC will be a unique experience for me.

My other endless passions are music, literature, and talking about the philosophy behind books. Thanks to the individuality and interpretability of art, I gained to meet different perspectives in conversations about art with my friends. On the other hand, another important achievement to me to learn many things about different cultures thanks to art.

If you have any questions about the project, please feel free to ask.

See you in the next blogs!

Best,

Aybüke