Andreas Nikolaidis

Hi everyone,

My name is Andreas, I am 22 years old and I am from Cyprus. I am studying Mechanical engineering at Nottingham University in a 4-year course (MEng) and I have currently finished my third year of studies. During my high school years and up until last year I didn’t enjoy programming and I considered it somewhat boring. The main reason for this lies behind the fact that I would find no joy in solving equations numerically because the beautiful and clever mathematical complexity of an analytical solution is lost behind a rather simplistic representation of the equation. This has changed about a year ago when my fluid mechanics professor described how the famous Navier-Stokes equation is highly non-linear and an analytical solution is said to be impossible. While digging for solutions I understood that programming and good numerical representation of equations is a rather complex task and that gained my interest. With the beginning of my last academic year I made a module choice on software and mechatronics allowing me to work with C programming language but also learning a lot about the computer architecture. My group yearlong project was about constructing a pocketQube Satellite (small satellite) where the tasks of the satellite were controlled through a raspberry Pi which allowed me to work with the Linux system and also learn a lot about the Python language which was used for the creation of the software of the project. Even though I still lack the skills and experience on programming I decided to further challenge myself by applying and at last accepting a position for PRACE Summer of HPC 2019. I am sure that it will be an amazing experience with a lot to learn and up until now I have met very kind and helping people who care about providing this experience.

Thanks.