An optimized, high performance summer

Greetings from the lovely but rainy city of Istanbul, instead of Barcelona beaches. The outside is gloomy, but I woke up today with the excitement of the first day of my high performance summer as a SoHPC student in Barcelona Supercomputing Centre!

About me

Before moving on to the SoHPC, my project and what has happened so far, I would like to give a brief background on me.

I am Enes! I am a Computer Engineering and Electrical & Electronics Engineering junior in Koç University, Istanbul.

I love creating projects and being involved in lots of stuff!

I am the co-founder and currently co-president of KU AIRS for two years. You can check out here and see what we have been doing. Also, I am a co-founder and team captain of SPARK Autonomous Car Team under the roof of KU AIRS. We are joining Teknofest Robotaksi Contest, the only self-driving car contest in Turkey. We have won the first place in the preliminary design & simulation phase in last year’s competition. However, we could not have continued the project due to COVID-19. Now, we are preparing again for this year and I am leading an amazing software team. We have currently passed the stages until the finals and keep preparing our car for the race!

I am also a GLLP fellow and a University Innovation Fellow – a fellowship organized by Stanford d.school – in my university. Here, me and my friends create projects to solve the most common problems in student life. I mostly contribute to KULendar project, a comprehensive calendar portal for all kinds of events in our school.

Alongside these, I have worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at Intelligent User Interfaces Lab, working on AI-based sketch recognition and design solutions for PowerPoint. Nowadays, I am with the Autonomous Vision Group at Koç University working on end-to-end autonomous driving.

How I Met SoHPC?

Summer of HPC is a training/research program for all levels of education starting from undergraduate organized by PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) with the partners from across the Europe.

My meeting with SoHPC happened through a mail sent by my Operating Systems professor. I was struck by this opportunity to get an international research experience while meeting with lots of new people and on top of that getting a generous stipend.

Building Resilient Machine Learning Applications (From HPC to Edge)

The application required me to state 3 preferences among the projects. I am particularly interested in the distributed training of machine learning models and the use of high performance computing to make more robust ML applications. On top of these, I would like to work in the robotics perception field in the future as a researcher. Thus, it would be very important for me to learn about distributed training of ML models and using deep networks trained in big clusters in all kinds of robots, potentially with low compute capabilities and that critically requires resilient outcomes.

Therefore, I chose to go with the project given in the heading of this section in Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. With the mentorship of Albert Kahira and Leonardo Bautista Gomez, we will work on training models on cluster and optimizing them to work on edge devices.