Posted on by Adrian Lundell Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021, Projects 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hello, my name is Adrian and I am attending the Summer of High Performance Computing program doing the project Hybrid AI Enhanced Monte Carlo Methods for Matrix Computation on Advanced Architectures. It might seem like a lot of words, but essentially it boils down to replacing some part of different algorithms for solving very large linear equation systems with reinforcement learning. I will expand on this in upcoming posts, but for now all I can say is that it feels like a very exciting project and that I will definitely learn a lot!

As for my background I just finished my first year as a master student in the Complex Adaptive System program at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, following three years doing the Engineering Mathematics bachelor. This means that I have studied plenty of linear algebra, algorithms, and programming, making this project a perfect fit for me. Also, the master thesis and the resulting end of my studies is on the horizon, and so SoHPC might be a hint of what sort of work I will be doing after that. When I am not doing that type of work I know that I like to go climbing, watching a nice movie, or having a coffee together with a dear friend.

Happy computing! /Adrian

Posted on by Regina Mumbi Gachomba Posted in Blogs 2021 — 60 Comments ↓

Hi! My name is Mumbi.

This is my first blog post submission for this year’s PRACE Summer of HPC where you get to know me, my application experience and also get a sneak peek of what I will be working on in the next seven weeks.

#define REGINA_MUMBI

İ am a 23 year old student , born and raised in Nairobi,Kenya. İ am currently pursuing my bachelor’s degree in Computer engineering at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University in Turkey. My main motivation for applying for this year’s soHPC was my newly found interest in computer system architecture from a class İ took last semester.

How I got here

It all started  when a friend sent me a Facebook post announcing this year’s summer of HPC applications were open. Before that time, I had never heard about PRACE , nor did I know a lot about high performance computing, but I had heard of Barcelona Supercomputing Center from Dan Brown’s “Origin”,one of my favorite books. This year,there were 33 amazing projects to choose from. I put in my application and waited…

My ordeal with the spam folder

One lazy afternoon ,a week before the results release,İ decided to check my junk email out of boredom and to my surprise, there were five follow-up emails from one of  the soHPC coordinators. They were enquiries on my project choices and my reference letter submission. The deadlines to make changes to my application had already passed and even as I tried to salvage the situation by responding to the emails, I knew for sure that my chances of getting selected were close to nil.

İ was wrong.

On 1st of May, I woke up to an email informing me that I had been selected for my first choice project .İt felt so surreal.İ was ecstatic!

email screenshot

Project 2101

This summer, I will be working on the analysis of data management policies in HPC architectures together with my project partner Aneta İvanicova. This MEEP project, situated at Barcelona supercomputing center, involves assessing various data management policies that will allow faster data access and movement through the different levels of memory hierarchy (more about it here). We will be guided by our mentor Borja Perez. This past week ,İ have had the opportunity to virtually attend the rigorous training at İCHEC (İrish Center for High End Computing) where we covered various topics such as memory parallelization, interfacing C code with python and performance analysis on HPC systems . I look forward to sharing more with you on what I have learnt so far from the project as time goes by.

And that’s about it from me for post #1.Make sure to stick around for more blog posts detailing my progress in the coming weeks. Also, don’t hesitate to comment below with any questions or remarks that you may have about participating in soHPC or the application process.

Meanwhile, you might want to check your junk folder…

Posted on by Iakov Kharitonov Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021, Projects 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hello! My name is Iakov, I am from Russia, but I study in the UK. A couple weeks prior to me writing this self-introduction, I finished my three-year-long Geophysics degree. During my studies, I’ve had a chance to acquire some computational skills, apart from all things “Geo”. Having a more “computing inclined” mindset, I naturally began the search for summer internships which would allow getting some “hands on” programming experience.

After the typical nerve-wracking process of sending out applications, I was delighted to have been selected for the project 2124 in Summer of HPC by PRACE. That really was great because this programme was an amazing opportunity to spend a summer learning a more about computing and testing scientific ideas on a HPC system as part of a research project (you don’t get to do that every day!)

Thoughts on the project

It is possible for the name of the project I will be working on to sound a bit terrifying: “Hybrid AI Enhanced Monte Carlo Methods for Matrix Computation on Advanced Architectures”. However, I was immediately attracted to it because it combines Machine Learning, Monte Carlo methods and inversion problems, all of which I am interested in. At university, I took a class, specifically dedicated to inversion problems in Geosciences and the basics of their numerical implementations. Such problems are very important in the study of the Earth where modelling a medium with large number of physical parameters is one of the key approaches to research. A traditional example is inverting the data recorded by seismometers (instruments sensitive to ground shaking from earthquakes or other seismic events) to obtain velocity structure of the Earth. That, in turn, can tell us a lot about what goes on below our feet. Do not be worried, that is all for the digression into the field of Geophysics for now.

Model of seismic wavefield propagating through the layers of Earth. You are free to stare at it as long as you like.

Unlike what has been described above, this SoHPC project is theory oriented. There is a lot to do without even dealing with applications. This summer is definitely going to be challenging for me, but that’s a good thing. The best way to get better at something or to learn new concepts is simply to get out there and start doing! I expect to invest time into chasing up different bits of theory and figuring out how things work.

First impressions

It remains to be seen what my work routine for the rest of the summer will be, but for now, we are past the training week! It was great to learn about such powerful tools as OpenMP and MPI, along with Cython, Numba and more. I want to say special thanks to the instructors from Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) who organised the whole event and presented the material in a superb way. So far, I have only had one meeting with my project mentor, co-mentor and the rest of the team. I am looking forward to progressing with my introductory reading and seeing what comes next.

It has not been long since the start, but it is already clear that this journey is an exciting one. Stay tuned for updates on how the project is coming together and an explanation of what exactly I will be doing.

And to my fellow SoHPC participants: best of luck and enjoy!

Posted on by Scott le Roux Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021, Projects 2021 — No Comments ↓

My name is Scott le Roux, I am a recent mathematics graduate living in Dublin, Ireland. I undertook my bachelor’s in Trinity College Dublin and studied abroad in the University of Pennsylvania for my 3rd year, which was unfortunately cut short due to the COVID pandemic. I found out about the summer of HPC through an email from a university lecturer and thought it sounded great. Luckily the application deadline was pushed back this year as I would never have heard about it otherwise. The application was not easy as I was interested in doing almost all of the projects on offer, making the decision very hard. I am happy with my choice and allocation to undertake the project “Neural Networks in Quantum Chemistry“, mentored by Dr. Marián Gall. I am excited to get stuck into what will be a relatively new topic for me. With a degree in Mathematics it has been on my own head for me to gain exposure to the computational fields with more practical applications like computer science and machine learning. I became interested in applying mathematics to problems in other sciences after I undertook research in Upenn on my year abroad where I studied topics in Applied Topology. I learned about the protein folding process and molecular modelling and how topology can be used to understand these concepts. This gave me the inclination to further look into these problems and what other tools were being used to attack them. With all the hype around ML/DL and DeepMinds AlphaFold making giant leap towards the solving the protein folding problem late last year this accelerated my desire to learn more about how I can use machine learning to work on exciting problems in the natural sciences, hence my SoHPC project is perfectly suited to that desire.

More on me outside of academia: I am an avid sports player and fan. I played rugby in school and university and was afforded the opportunity to go on an exchange to play for Muir College just outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa for 3 months when I was 16. I was born in England and but have lived in Ireland most of my life. Before the pandemic hit I had begun to start travelling the world properly. During the summer of 2019 I travelled across Thailand and Vietnam before heading to America on my year abroad where I got to visit Las Vegas, New York and Mexico during my holidays. Fingers crossed everything returns to normality and I can pick up where I left off!

The sunset on Koh Phi Phi, Thailand

I am really looking forward to this summer to learn all about quantum and computational chemistry through the application of Machine Learning models. I hope this project will act as a fantastic stepping stone which will help consolidate everything I learned so far throughout my college career and can help me improve my technical and research skills. I would like to thank the team over at ICHEC for the enjoyable training week in which they comprehensively covered lots of interesting HPC material that I’m sure I will refer to throughout this project. Also, to Leon Kos and the rest of the team for their organisation of the program.

Posted on by Carlos Eduardo Cocha Toapaxi Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021, Projects 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hi everyone!

My name is Carlos Cocha and I am finishing my second semester at the University of Padova in Italy as part of my Erasmus Mundus Master Degree in Nuclear Physics.  I am from Ecuador and I lived there until I got my bachelor’s degree in Physics last year.

To make it short, during my studies I decided to work with my two great loves science and computing. It’s incredible how nowadays both are used in the biggest scientific discoveries through analyses or simulations that require huge computing power. Thus, programming is an essential tool for physicists due to all the theories and all the craziest hypothesize that someone can imagine could be simulated through powerful supercomputers.  It makes me feel that there are no limits if we know how to manage these tools. For that reason, I decided to apply to the PRACE Summer of HPC 2021 and be able to learn about High Performance Computing.

With this background, now you can imagine how excited I got when I received the email I was selected to participate in the program. I began to jump giddy with delight because the number of students was large and the chance to be selected was reduced. I was so excited that all my memories since my father bought me my first desktop computer came out. It’s funny how the Windows XP operating system was enough to catch my heart and to discover a new kind of happiness together with a starting passion for computing.

I like this tree because HPC comes to mind.

So here I am, telling you about me in this blog after being selected to be a part of the “High Throughput HEP Data Processing at HPC” project organized by CERN, Switzerland. This project was my first choice and the closest one to my previous experiences. As a physicist, it is going to be an invaluable experience.

Finally, I would like to thank SoHPC organizers for giving me this amazing opportunity and to everyone who read my post. I hope you enjoyed it and I would like to see you tracking my future posts with new updates about my project. The program has just begun and there is so much to tell you.

I would like to know how do you use computing in your daily activities/research? Feel free to comment.

Posted on by Venkata Mukund Kashyap Yedunuthala Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — No Comments ↓

I am a fourth-semester student of Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, studying Computational Materials Science. Among the three first names you see, I prefer being called Mukund. I am 23 years old. Originally from Hyderabad — one of the cosmopolitan cities located in southern India. Widely known for its Pearls, Hyderabad was the seat of the Nizam Dynasty until mid 20th century. Currently, it is one of the largest and emerging IT hubs of India. I’d been living in Germany since October 2019. While many of my peers tend to disagree, I absolutely adore the ambience presented by this university town located near Dresden. It is a breath of fresh air compared to the cacophony I’d experienced in Hyderabad. However, these bizarre circumstances, a result of the ongoing pandemic, have dampened my efforts to experience Germany at its best.

Constructed in 1591, Charminar (literally: four minarets) is the iconic monument, and a mosque, in Hyderabad. As seen above, the area comes alive particularly during the holy month of Ramadan.
Source: Jagannathsrs, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Truth be told, I did not envision myself as a student of Computational sciences. India’s budding space exploration programme, which is heavily televised and publicised, had built my appetite for science. As a kid, I was fascinated by Voyager 1 mission’s iconic photograph, “The Pale Blue Dot.” That awe-inspiring portrait of this planet, to this day, remains simultaneously daunting and fascinating. And, in these strange times, became a source of new perspectives. A combination of such factors lead me to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and, subsequently, my current field of study.

I gained most of my knowledge in programming in recent years. While my bachelor’s degree offered the basics of programming, I owe most of my current prowess to my education in Germany. I was introduced to High-Performance Computing in one such course offered by my university as a part of the curriculum. It was exhilarating to size up the potential of scientific research enabled by HPC. As you could imagine, my background in computational mechanics instantly made the connection to mind-boggling speeds of computations possible. Most of the solvers, to my understanding, rely on complex linear algebra. I realised that a well-constructed solver could do wonders. As such, when our professor alerted us about this opportunity, I applied immediately and eagerly hoped for a successful application.

As you may have guessed correctly by now, my application was successful. I’d been selected to work on Project 2123: Parallel radiative heat exchange solver for analyzing samples from the OSIRIS-REx space exploration mission.

Captured on Oct. 20, 2020, OSIRIS-REx mission’s Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event.
Source: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

From the moment I first noticed this project, I knew that I had to work on it. I was beyond thrilled to see the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touch down on asteroid Bennu in October last year. The craft, projected to return to Earth with the asteroid samples (!) in 2023, should go down in human history as one of the most significant scientific achievements. Thus, an opportunity to get a sneak-peek into the nuances of such a mission was already too good to pass up. Scientific ramifications and interest around the research aside, this project had suited my background exceptionally well. I am excited to make my contributions to this research, along with my teammate, Cormac McKinstry. While it is disappointing a bit that I wouldn’t be able to test my amateur French this time, I am eager to work from the comfort of my home, and learn a lot from my mentors, Daniel Pino Muños, and Modesar Shakoor.

Feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn page. I hope all of you stay safe, and healthy. Here’s to an exciting and productive summer ahead!

Posted on by Paolo Settembri Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — No Comments ↓
Is ‘catching’ the Sun really possible? Or just a fantasy?

Yes, you’ve read it right, creating the Sun here on Earth is not a sci-fi fantasy but a never so close reality.
Why such a thing? Recreating here on Earth the fusion reactions that happen in the core of the Sun could change forever our worldwide need for renewable sources of energy.
Serveral project involving the world greatest countries are in development, like Iter, and the world’s scientific community is thriving around all the different aspects involved in what could be one of the greatest achievements of humanity.

How can we study such complex theories and experiments? Well, we need very powerful tools and here HPC (High Performance Computing) come into play. Between the different projects and partnerships PRACE (Patnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) gives its strong contribution, and the Summer of HPC programme is an example of this.

Summer of HPC is a PRACE programme in which late-stage undergraduate and master’s students participate in pairs on different projects, related to PRACE technical or industrial work, supported and mentored from several PRACE hosting sites, spending two months working on those projects and produce a report and video of their results.
One of this projects is the ‘Computational atomic-scale modelling of materials for fusion reactors‘ mentored and supported by BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) Fusion group and is the one that I take part of. But who is talking? Let me introduce myself.

This is me, with the beautiful SoHPC 2021 T-shirt!

Hi, I’m Paolo Settembri, a 22 years old boy from Italy. I’m a student at the University of L’Aquila where I obtained a bachelor degree in Physics, and I’m currently attending at the first year of the master degree course in ‘Condensed Matter Physics:Nanotechnologies and Fundamentals’.
In my childhood I’ve been very curious and had a strong passion for Astrophysics, reading Stephen Hawking child books, so when I grew up I chose a ‘Liceo Scientifico’ for high school, which is a type of high school in Italy focused on Math,Physics and Science in general.
After graduation I joined the bachelor degree course in Physics and my passion switched from Astrophysics to Solid state physics. In my bachelor degree thesis I simulated a collision of a dark matter particle in a Sodium Iodide crystal at low temperatures.

It was the professor that mentored me during my thesis to notify me of the possibility of joining the SoHPC 2021. Searching through the projects I found the one perfect for me ‘Computational atomic-scale modelling of materials for fusion reactors’ and I decided to apply.
I was really sad and disappointed when no confirmation e-mail was arriving, even if only a few days were left before the final deadline; but then , maybe as I should have done previously, I checked the Spam inbox, and there it was, my confirmation letter, and it was sent to me days before.
I could not believe it, I almost didn’t make it in the program because I didn’t check the spam inbox, and in a few day I would have been discarded, luckly this did not happen!
I was a little scared of not having enough computational science knowledge to take part of the program but the training week really helped me, integrating my basic knowledge with high level informations; and now I look forward for the next weeks, in which I will start working on my project.

Schematics of the plasma inside the reactor (left), polycrystalline tungsten metal structure (right), a material of interest, and MareNostrum-4 supercomputer (background).

In the project me and another candidate will study, guided by the BSC Fusion group, materials used in fusion reactors, and using LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulations to investigate some of their properties. These materials can be used as protective layers in fusion reactors, but to do that they have to resist in really hard conditions, with temperatures of 108 °C inside the reactor.
Computer simulations are fundamental in cases where experimental data are not available or difficult to obtain like in this case, and the use of HPC technology will be key in obtaining larger and longer simulations.

I can’t wait to start working on this project, that could give a small contribution in what will possibly be one of the greatest achievements in human history, and I’m really thankful to PRACE and SoHPC organizers for this opportunity!

  • PRACE logo
  • SoHPC logo

Posted on by Mehmet Enes Erciyes Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021, Projects 2021 — No Comments ↓
Me in front of my school’s famous clock tower

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.

Posted on by Theodoros Aslanidis Posted in Blogs 2021 — 1 Comment ↓

Get to know me

Hello everyone! I am Theodoros Aslanidis and I am so pumped for PRACE Summer of HPC 2021! Before Ι talk about my participation in the program and specifically about the project that I will work on with my partner, I would like to say a few things about myself.

I am 22 years old, I was born in Athens, Greece and grew up in Nafpaktos, a small picturesque seaside town where I lived until I got into university in Volos. This year I completed the fourth year of my studies at the University of Thessaly as an undergraduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I discovered my love for computers quite early, while I was in elementary school where they sparked my interest and I wanted to know how these complex machines work. So, when I was about 15 years old I had my first contact with programming and I was sure then what subject I would study in the future.

One of my favourite university courses I took was High Performance Computing, in which I learned a lot about this part of computer science as I worked on OpenMP and CUDA projects. This was the main reason that gave me the motivation to send my application to PRACE SoHPC 2021, which I am really excited to be a part of.

How I learned about Summer of HPC programme

I first found out about SoHPC last summer when I was scrolling through my facebook homepage and saw a post from a friend of mine who had taken part in it and shared his experience. His name is Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail and some of you may know him as, during the training week, he won last year’s best ambassador award and spoke about his own involvement in SoHPC. I was quite curious to find out what exactly it was about and as soon as I received an email from my university regarding SoHPC 2021 edition, I could not resist sending my application.

Waiting for my application results…

Several months past and I had not received an email from PRACE, so I thought that I was probably rejected and I felt devastated. But, as it turned out, all the emails had ended up in the spam folder! Actually, there were several of them informing me that I had been selected and I was pleasantly surprised and relieved. At that time, Summer of HPC was the only thing that occupied my little mind!

More about my team’s project

Due to the experience I had gained through my university’s HPC course in graphics card programming using CUDA, the project that seemed the most interesting to me and which I chose to work on during this summer is 2130: Designing Scientific Applications on GPUs organized by ULux-University of Luxembourg. Through my involvement with this project, I intend to expand my knowledge on CUDA programming by implementing scientific applications on graphics cards. Already knowing the basics of the architecture of the GPU and its computing power, being able to run scientific applications on a GPU sounds like an exciting and interesting challenge.

So, what has happened so far?

This year’s training week is over. Due to the pandemic we could not meet in person, however the experience was immersive. I met my partner and my mentor and we had a little chat about what exactly we will do in the project. Our first task is to take a look at PETSc which is a toolkit for scientific applications. Can’t wait to start working on this intriguing project! I will keep you informed about our progress, see you in my next blog post!

Bonus! My debugging assistant

My cat, Gatsby (not JS)

Posted on by Raska Soemantoro Posted in Blogs 2021 — 26 Comments ↓

An excited Raska on a beautiful English day. [1]

Manchester, UK – the birds are chirping, and the sun is unusually cooperative in England this morning. I get up and commence my daily routine, which obviously includes the mandatory tub of hot coffee. It is the start of PRACE Summer of HPC, and I am ready to enjoy my high-performance summer!

About me

A little bit of background about myself; my name is Raska, I am 21 years old and I come from sunny Jakarta, Indonesia. Over the past few years, I have been studying at the University of Manchester in the UK where I recently obtained an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering.

I was extremely happy when I received my invite for Summer of HPC – not only am I given the opportunity to work on supercomputers, but also in such a diverse setting, with students and host institutes spread all across Europe. Our international team is made up of 5 individuals with an interdisciplinary set of specialisations. Working alongside me are; Mario who is a physicist from Germany, Veerle and Silvia who are both marine geologists at the UK National Oceanography Centre and the Italian Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS) respectively, and Massimiliano who is our HPC specialist based at CINECA in Bologna, Italy. Of course, the current pandemic has made it difficult for travel, even within Europe. Therefore, I will be working from my room in Manchester.

Automated classification for mapping submarine structures by artificial intelligence strategies

This summer, I am joining CINECA as part of the Summer of HPC programme to work on using artificial intelligence methods to classify submarine structures of the Mediterranean Sea near the Italian coast (Project 2111 – see more details here). The idea is to develop a system that can learn from depth maps of the sea to automate the classification process of undersea reliefs. The classified maps are then used to help identify marine geohazards, which can help a range of applications such as search and rescue, habitat mapping, and more.

I became interested in this project after doing my undergrad dissertation; I developed software that detects and learns the shape of damage in structures such as cracks and vegetation to help engineers conduct inspections of buildings and tested it on a 3D laser scan of a bridge here in Manchester (you can check out a short overview here). While the sea can be very different to a building, computer vision principles can be transferable across different datasets. So, when my dissertation tutor encouraged me to apply for this programme, it was a complete no-brainer for me.

Supercomputers to the rescue

Supercomputers aren’t just computers with a cape! [2]

Classifying undersea structures of the Italian coast is obviously more computationally intensive than cracks on a bridge (spoiler: the former is far much larger!), so to achieve this goal we will need the appropriate resources. While I sit here in my room, our program will run on Marconi100, one of CINECA’s supercomputers in Bologna, Italy. Supercomputers are basically a cluster of computers (called ‘nodes’) that work together solve problems. Marconi100, as of July 2021, is built up of 980 nodes – imagine how powerful it is!

Before we go…

[3]

I’m going to end this post with a little question; I previously mentioned how supercomputers such as Marconi100 are powerful enough to run artificial intelligence software on big sets of data, but that is only one of the many things it can do! What kind of problems do you think supercomputers work to solve? I am interested to see what you think!

Get in touch with me on Linkedin, ResearchGate, and Facebook!

Image sources:

[1] Raska Soemantoro – Author’s own image

[2] Little computer and super computer – Clips Ahoy Free Images http://www.clipsahoy.com/webgraphics2/as2419.htm

[3] Free question stock photo – FreeImages https://www.freeimages.com/photo/question-1239547

Posted on by David Knapp Posted in Blogs 2021 — 43 Comments ↓

Welcome to my blog about the Prace Summer of HPC. My name is David Knapp and for the next two months, I am taking part in the summer of HPC. I come from Germany and currently, I am living in Bonn. There, I studied mathematics and just finished my master in computer science.

At the beginning of my studies, I wasn’t interested in coding at all. But that changed quickly during the first courses about applied mathematics, especially about numerics. After a coding seminar on fluid simulation, I discovered my passion for numerical simulations and scientific programming. The combination of mathematical challenges and finding the most efficient way to write a computer program to simulate it is what interests me most. What got you into programming and what do you like most about it?

With the start of my master studies I started working at the german aerospace centre. There I work at the High-performance computing group where I already got some experience with High-performance computing. At the beginning of this year, my supervisor forwarded me an E-Mail about the Summer of HPC. I was immediately excited about it and started the coding challenge you had to solve for the application. The opportunity to work for two months on a big coding project is one of the reasons why I applied for the Summer of HPC. Interchanging expertise with other enthusiasts during the project is what excites me most about it.

I applied for the project about the Numerical Simulation of the Boltzmann-Nordheim equation. To me, it is a completely new topic and first did not know anything about it. Discovering a completely new field and unravelling its mysteries is awesome. Even though I do not expect to become an expert in quantum physics in two months, I hope to get at least a basic understanding of it. You can see my progress on the Boltzmann-Nordheim equation in the video.

The goal for the Summer of HPC will be to deepen my knowledge about the equation and how to simulate it. Especially how to improve the performance of the computation using parallel programming. In our training week, we learned about two paradigms to parallel programming, MPI and OpenMP. For this project, I will probably work with MPI the most and I hope to find the right techniques to improve the computation. Apart from the science, I hope to enjoy the summer with the other participants, to get to know each other and to share our experiences.

What are your expectations? Would you like to get some experience with High-performance computing? Feel free to write your answer in the comments.

Posted on by Mario Udo Gaimann Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — 4 Comments ↓

A physicist, an engineer, two submarine geologists and a High Performance Computing (HPC) specialist walk in a bar. The engineer orders a drink and asks “Is this going to be a joke?” The physicist replies “No, this is going to be an interdisciplinary HPC project, enriched with German humor. And now let’s start working.” 
But wait – before embarking on our HPC journey, let me tell you a bit more about the physicist in this story.

Who are you?

I am Mario, a Master student in theoretical physics at LMU Munich. Recently I completed my Master’s thesis with Prof. Dr. Erwin Frey (statistical and biological physics), where I applied evolutionary algorithms to biological transcription networks. Previous projects comprised modeling the life and death of T cells, determining diffusion coefficients in ionic liquids and measuring the physical stability of pharmaceutical formulations. I am interested in theoretical and computational aspects of evolution, such as open-endedness and the evolution of intelligent systems. 

What is your project about?

The project is about automatically recognizing submarine structures using artificial intelligence and HPC (see also the project page). Submarine structures are of general interest because some of them are considered geohazards, such as submarine canyons for example. In the past, researchers classified and marked these geohazards by hand in maps of the seabed (so called morphobathymetric maps). Here, we are going to devise an automated approach using machine learning strategies. Ideally, the model we develop is able to locate and mark these geohazards automatically on an arbitrary morphobathymetric map.

Why did you choose your project?

The project is very appealing to me because I enjoy crossing the boundaries of conventional fields. It allows me to dive into the field of submarine geology and apply my problem-solving skills there. Of course, I am particularly interested in leveraging the power of HPC for this interdisciplinary project. Moreover, I am excited about researching and applying cutting-edge artificial intelligence strategies.

Who are you working with?

The host organization of this project is the Italian supercomputing consortium CINECA, which is part of the European HPC network PRACE. I am looking forward very much to work with my teammate Raska Soemantoro (the engineer in our story) as well as my supervisors Dr. Silvia Ceramicola, Dr. Veerle Huvenne (the submarine geologists) and Dr. Massimiliano Guarrasi (the HPC specialist) in the weeks to come. They are affiliated with the University of Manchester, UK, the Italian National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS) in Trieste, the UK National Oceanography Centre in Southampton (NOC), as well as the CINECA headquarters in Bologna, respectively. I am very excited to be part of such an interdisciplinary and international team! 

How did you get into coding?

Over the years my interest in computational methods grew. It began with the course “Computational and Numerical Physics” at FAU Erlangen, where I was thrown in the deep end – either, I would teach myself programming or I would fail the course (spoiler: I chose the first option). With more and more courses, internships and projects I eventually got more and more experience, which is why I now feel confident to solve complex problems using computational methods. 

Why did you apply for the PRACE Summer of HPC?

In fact, there is a handful of reasons why I joined the PRACE Summer of HPC. Initially, I was intrigued by the career path of Dr. Thomas Schoenemayer, a physicist / meteorologist who specialized in HPC and now works for NVIDIA on autonomous driving. By using my graphics card for the distributed computing project Folding@Home along with Curecoin, I experienced the power of (well, distributed) HPC systems for the first time. Eventually I parallelized code during my Master’s thesis and used it on a local cluster. This made me curious to learn more about HPC and to expand my HPC skill set.  HPC systems fascinate me because they are the common ground for advancing a whole range of fields, ranging from forecasting climate change to finding cures for diseases. 

What’s next?

I am really excited to be part of the PRACE Summer of HPC and cannot wait to start working with this amazing team!  While this is a remote internship, of course I hope that we can enact the joke in the beginning of my post in the future and meet up in a real bar with Indonesian kopi tubruk (coffee), British tea, German Weißbier (wheat beer), Belgian kriek lambic (cherry beer) as well as Italian wine. And now I’d like to ask you a question:

What kind of updates you would like to see from me? 

My first steps in submarine geology? Our progress on building classifiers? How we leverage CINECA’s HPC capabilities? Machine learning in Fortran 77? Morphobathymetric memes? Please let me know in the comments!

Feel free to stay in touch with me 🙂
LinkedIn | ResearchGate | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Posted on by Daniel Cortild Posted in Blogs 2021 — No Comments ↓
A picture of me, Daniel Cortild

Surprisingly, writing “stupid” code is not always the most efficient way of getting a task done. Often programming does not only require coding skills, but also a lot of thinking, problem-solving and optimising before reaching a somewhat satisfactory result. Besides optimising the code, speeding it up can also be reached by executing it on a larger machine, say a supercomputer.

I am currently studying for a non-programming bachelor, namely a bachelor in Mathematics. Although our main competencies usually do not take place behind a computer, we still had some courses relying on some programming skills; the Numerical Mathematics classes, which link the world of Mathematics and the world of coding in an elegant way. In most cases, solving complex mathematical equations analytically is hard or even impossible. One thus has to refer to a numerical method, which approximates the solution. As a mathematician we do, of course, not like approximations, so we try to reduce them as much as possible to get the most accurate solutions with as little computations as possible. The study of such algorithms is the field of numerical and computations Mathematics, which I have been specializing in over the past year.

Wanting to learn new skills over the summer, I started looking out for new opportunities. When I got referred to PRACE Summer of HPC I immediately started writing my application, as I only had a week left before the already extended deadline. After a lot of reading and writing, I decided to apply and got selected for improving a python package to provide multiple standardized interpolation methods for atmospheric chemistry models! I only found out weeks after my selection because of Gmail’s elaborate spam filter, but fortunately did not need much time to make my decision.

After a week of training in HPC provided by PRACE and ICHEC, I already know I will learn a lot over the course of this summer. I am very excited to start at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center this week and learn more about what I will spend the following 8 weeks on. Although I will only be virtually in Barcelona, I hope to be able to enjoy the “Spanish” weather and sun.

My Spanish friend casually reminding me of what I am missing

Over the summer, I will be posting updates about the advancement of my project and about what I learn. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me in the comments, or via LinkedIn.

Posted on by Kevser İLDEŞ Posted in Blogs 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hello everyone, I’m 22-year-old fresh graduate Kevser İLDEŞ. I am a computer engineer and come from Turkey. I got my bachelor’s degree education in Marmara University in Istanbul. I met with SoHPC through an e-mail from my professor and a bit doubtful at the beginning. But thanks to her encouragements, I decided to try my chance and surprisingly become one of participants 2021. At this point I want to say a couple of more things, I had almost lost this great opportunity since all of acceptance mails were unfortunately ended up in spam folder and saw the last one which fell in my inbox by chance. I want to thank to the coordinator of the program for not giving up on me despite all of those several e-mails.

I am selected for 2103 Precision based differential checkpointing for HPC applications which was my first choice. Now, let me tell you a bit about the project.

Project

Reliability is a big issue especially in supercomputers. Supercomputers grow day to day and so does number of components. In High performance computing (HPC), systems are built from highly reliable components. But with the increase in number, the likelihood of failure becomes a serious issue as the overall failure rate of supercomputers also increases. It is expected that the mean-time-between-failures lie within hours and since computing hours are expensive, it becomes prohibitive to run applications at that scale without any protection against failures and fault tolerance (FT) is a well-known issue.

There are several techniques to protect the application and checkpoint-and-restart is a common one. It means taking snapshots of the application at specific times, that is, saving the system state in stable storage, frequently a parallel file system (PFS), and in case of a failure restarting the execution from the last recovery point. CR technique is relatively inexpensive but when checkpointing a large application, it may lead to an I/O bottleneck since the I/O bandwidth of supercomputers does not increase at the same speed as computational capabilities.

There are other techniques that do not depend on I/O however, as they are often application specific or too expensive in terms of resources checkpoint-and-restart is often the only viable solution. Modern checkpoint libraries leverage all available storage hierarchies in sophisticated checkpoint schemes and checkpoint encoding, checkpoint staging, differential and incremental checkpointing are some of advanced techniques.

The objective of the project is to implement the developed mechanism into the multi-level checkpoint library Fault Tolerance Interface (FTI) which is maintained at the BSC. For more information about the project and FTI, follow this link.

Training Week – First Impression

First week of the program was the training week and they give us an introduction to the program. Besides they give us insights about Python, OpenMP, parallel programming with MPI and many others. Additionally, with hands-on labs, they made us practice and they also answer each question carefully and patiently, helps everyone to get to know these technologies.

I met my mentors a couple of weeks earlier from training week and had a short talk at the first day of the training week. I was a bit excited but after having a talk with them, I had relaxed so much. They are all helpful and warmhearted. I hope we would have a great work together. Let’s see how this adventure will go.

I wish everyone a great time. I will be around during this internship. Don’t hesitate to contact me in case of anything.

Best wishes…

Posted on by Morten Holm Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hey there and welcome to my blog, but is this really everything you need to know? probably not, but you’re here and I appreciate it and we can always fill in the blanks over the next 2 months. Over the summer I’ll get into many of the aspects of writing a coding project meant for a supercomputer and it’ll be done from scratch. As this blog goes live I’ve completed the training week along with many other eager individuals. I’m participating in the Summer of High-performance Computing (SoHPC) held by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE). I’ll do my best to post something interesting about this process and the project I’ll be working on throughout the summer. I’ll be answering any questions from you along the way to the best of my capabilities and invite you to partake in this journey (I may even write a post to give an in-depth answer, so ask away!) and for what comes next.

Welcome to my slice of life

Happy wife, Happy life – Ice cream is mandatory

My name is Morten and I am 32 years old. I am happily married and we live in the suburbs of Copenhagen and like most of the world, have been in zoom meetings every day and work from home. I’ve graduated with a degree in quantum physics and currently, I’m a masters student in computational physics at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

In one of my recent courses, my professor recommended that I applied for this SoHPC opportunity. The application process was straight forward and after sending in a small coding challenge, CV and motivation letter I was happy to receive an acceptance letter. My hope is to end this experience by contributing my work, dedication and expertise into a useful end result that will be applied in academia and in the process expand on my own skillset.

Outside my academic interests, I thoroughly enjoy exploring nature. Through my studies, I’ve spent far too much time sitting down and there is nothing better than a long hike. Waking up in a tent and looking out at the early rays of the sun and taking in a view and drinking a hard-earned cup of coffee is pretty great. Overall I like finding the beauty in the details and have explored photography a lot where I get to experience and delve into these moments. Under the pandemic, I’ve also had time to refine baking a bit, after all, following a recipe is a bit like programming. It is a set of instructions to follow and execute and sometimes you end up with a surprisingly well-executed code/or baking good and other times it’s a dense mess in all shapes and sizes and you don’t know where you went wrong.

From hiking to photography to baking I try to enjoy life

So what exactly comes next you ask?

Good question!
To make a long story short (and telling that story properly in a future post) I will along with my partner in crime, Tiziano Barberi, have access to a supercomputer at the Hartree centre and write some code, that’s about it.
This is where I hear you say “but Morten.. you could just code it on your own computer right?”. And yeah, I could technically program it on my computer, but it would properly catch on fire along the way. This is where a supercomputer comes into the picture, as it’s at least twice as good as my setup.. and maybe closer to 40.000 times as good.

My inferior desktop setup with 4 processor cores vs IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer (not the one I’ll be using) “Intrepid” at Argonne National Laboratory with 164,000 processor cores

While we’re not accessing the entire system, we can use so-called compute time for a subset of the supercomputer. This enables us to do crazy cool parallel coding that performs much faster than what my computer could accomplish alone. So far it has also been pretty easy to log in and use these computers and run the code.

The friendly log in message from the kay supercomputer in Ireland during our training week, sometimes it just nice to know that something works.

Thank you very much for reading my scribbles thus far, I hope you’ll want to follow my journey and next time I’ll tell you about the finer details of the project and give some further insight into how clever the entire setup and algorithm is.
Meanwhile, you can also check out some of the other people writing their own blogs and all of the projects that are involved in this SoHPC

Posted on by Aybuke Ozcelik Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — No Comments ↓

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

Posted on by Ulaş Mezin Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — No Comments ↓

Greetings to all,

Actually, I would like to go back a little bit with you to explain my curiosity about computer science. In my childhood, I entered the world of science by questioning how the first bridge has stood for hundreds of years. Along with my education, I always progressed by asking the following question, how? . As each information I learned helps to take the next step in my development, and as an individual conscious of the development and consequences of technology along with my biological development, I decided to study computer engineering at Izmir Institute of Technology, so we can better understand together that meeting you on this blog is not a coincidence. I will try to share my happiness with you during this time as I will embody my excitement and curiosity in the HPC Implementation of Molecular Surfaces project No. 2132 for 2 months.

How did Journey to HPC start? 

This time let’s go to a very recent date, 2 years ago to 2019. This journey started with my first Summer of HPC hearing and googling it. When I examined the projects, when I saw that the world born with the colour of science is gathered under the roof of HPC, I said to myself: I will contribute to this world as soon as possible.

Journey to 2132 HPC Implementation of Molecular Surfaces

I discovered my interest in image processing with the Deep Vision course I took while doing Erasmus at Heidelberg University. When I returned to my school after completing my Erasmus, I took the computer architecture course and found myself in another field. My journey, which started in the CPU with these areas, started with parallel programming while looking for solutions to speed problems, to jump into a new knowledge pool. During this time, I processed my thesis and all my projects by analysing CPU and GPU with CUDA. At this point, while examining the 2021 Summer of HPC projects with the excitement of concretization, the following sentence crossed my mind while reading the description of the project. Here is the project I need to be part of. Let me talk a little bit about the purpose of the project,it is a fully functional molecular surface that aims to be made more robust, re-examined, fine-tuned and scaled up with getting the best performance. After completing the applications, I waited for the announcement date with excitement and my journey started with Your invitation to PRACE Summer of HPC 2021, which I saw in my e-mail.

Training Week

Gaining information, exchanging ideas, gaining a new perspective and having fun are the things I encounter often this week. Even though it was remote, it was a week where I could easily ask questions and get the answer in a way that eliminates the question mark in my mind, I could learn each topic by concretizing with exercises, I could not realize how the days during training week passed and at the end of each day, I could get rid of tiredness with a smile of learning.

Let’s discuss

When Eniac (the first computer) is introduced, the date was February 15, 1946. It weighed more than 30 tons and occupied 167 m2.

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discussion.png
source:https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Discussion.png

Its clock speed was 100,000 cycles per second. Nowadays, think about your computer through which you read this page. It weighs maybe 1kg, occupies about 0.12 m2. Its clock speed 4,000,000,000 (assumed 4ghz). When we think this continuum, do you think that each house will host the summer of HPC together in the future? Please write your ideas in the comment

Hint: Desktop quantum computer is expected to be released in 2022 which costs less than $5000.   

Thank you all of you for taking the time to read my blog. This is just the beginning. I hope to see you again in my next posts. Let’s begin…

Posted on by Aslihan Uysal Posted in Blogs 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hello everyone, my name is Aslıhan, I am 26 years old and live in Istanbul, Turkey. I graduated in Applied Mathematics from Yildiz Technical University. Currently, I continue my master’s in Computational Science And Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. This spring term was my first term on my master and I believe the Summer of HPC program is a really great opportunity for both master’s classes and the future career that I want to pursue.

With the classes I had during my senior year in university, a plan and work area that I want to pursue have shaped in my mind and as the magic world of data has been fascinating me and pulling me inside, I was very determined to continue to work on machine learning. My thesis subject was “Passenger demand forecasting with data mining methods in the aviation industry”.

I worked in 3 startups after I graduated from university in Machine Learning Engineer and Data Scientist roles. During these 3 years, I had a chance to work on great big data projects on predictive models such as time series prediction and customer segmentations. But over the past year, I wanted to shape my career with more scientific ways and do some research on what really fascinates and thrills me that actually my current master’s program covers.

After I got an email from my professor about this program, I was so excited and thought that I definitely need to participate and I am sure it would strongly enrich my future studies and help me in my career. Moreover, I consider this program to be a great opportunity to get to know how to solve more complex scientific and engineering systems and problems. I am always very curious about the different approaches to engineering problems.

I will be working on project 2105 “Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning For Biomedical Texts” and I feel super excited and happy to be selected from this project and also to be able to have a chance to contribute to this project. It is a really great opportunity for me to be able to learn more about text mining and the mBERT model for multilingual classification model in NLP. At the end of this summer, I am going to learn a lot of things as I have already learned lots of key components about scalable parallel programming. Being able to work with such amazing mentors and my fellow teammate Lazaros Zervos I will be working with is a privilege, it will be such an amazing summer both experiencing the project and meeting new people as well!

One of my addictive hobby output or we can say a masterpiece of tiny pieces.

To be mention myself a bit more, I describe myself as quite an active and competitive person when it comes to doing sports. I used to play volleyball for about 10 years and then continue with swimming as a hobby. But apparently, I took my hobby very seriously as I intended to “Bosphorus Cross-Continental Swimming Race” over the past year before Corona and I made a huge effort to complete 800m under 20 minutes but I might need to start over again for my goal. I also want to mention another hobby of mine, actually more than a hobby, sometimes I call it my desperate addiction as well which is Puzzles!

I am looking forward to starting the project, get to know more about and dive deep into it, Let the PRACE SoHPC 2021 begin! I wish all of the participants the best of luck!

Posted on by Jiahua Zhao Posted in Blogs 2021, PRACE Summmer of HPC 2021 — 2 Comments ↓

What’s in summer? The heat, the noise of insects, the ice cream… and programming! I am honored to attend such a wonderful summer HPC party!

The first is a self-introduction

Ciao! My name is Jiahua Zhao, 22 years old, from China. Since 2016, I have been studying for a bachelor degree in oceanography at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China. After completing my bachelor degree in 2020, I came to Italy for studying. At present, I am studying for a master degree in geophysics at the University of Padova (UniPD), majoring in computational specialization, and mainly use Python/MATLAB/Fortran as programming languages. I am fascinated by computational seismology and geodynamics, and I am interested in applying HPC/AI to solve the problems of my studying field. In order to improve my programming ability, I also like to accept programming challenges very much. During my undergraduate years, I often participated in some hackathon and supercomputer competitions. The best experience was to participate in ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC, the world’s largest supercomputer hackathon) with my team in 2019, and won the First Prize and Application Innovation in the final. Last fall, I learned about PRACE Summer Of HPC in an activity promotion, so I made active preparations, registration and finally got the rare opportunity.

ASC19 final, the joy of victory, guess where I am in the photo 🙂

Then share my summer project

The project I participated in was 2115: Performance of Parallel Python Programs on ARCHER2, which was provided by EPCC of the University of Edinburgh, under the guidance of Dr. David Henty and Dr. Mario Antonioletti. Briefly, the project is to simulate the fluid flow in the cavity by computational fluid dynamics (CFD), solve the PDE by using the finite difference method and Jacobi algorithm, and finally obtain the velocity field of the fluid. The specific mathematical principles and parallel strategies will be introduced in my future posts. In the next two months, my partner Alejandro Dinkelberg and I will optimize the existing Python serial code on Supercomputer ARCHER2, as well as perform performance tests and optimizations on the original C and Fortran serial/parallel code on ARCHER2. In addition, ARCHER2 is the new UK HPC National Tier-1 supercomputer, which is an HPE Cray EX supercomputing system with 5,848 compute nodes, and each compute node has dual AMD EPYC Zen2 (Rome) 64 core CPUs, giving ~750,000 cores in total (more details: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/).

Finally talk about my choice and expectation

The reason why I choose this project is that I am very eager to learn the advanced usage of Python, especially the application implementation on supercomputers. I often use Python to deal with problems in geophysics. These problems (such as forward and inverse calculation, cross-correlation calculation of a large amount of seismic data, etc.) often require more CPU computing resources. Therefore, I paid attention to the content of Python HPC, and hope to apply some skills of Python HPC to the field of geophysics. In addition, I am interested in the architecture and computing performance of different hardware platforms. I have been exposed to Intel Xeon Scalable platform before, and I also heard that AMD EPYC has potential powerful computation ability, so I am willing to explore the performance of Python on AMD EPYC platform (desiring the wonderful reaction between Python and AMD EPYC). More importantly, geodynamics involves many problems of continuum mechanics. In the past course of numerical simulation, I have not studied the numerical methods for high performance computing. Therefore, this project is a very good opportunity for me to learn the parallel strategies of solving PDE in continuum mechanics, and I hope this summer experience can be enlightening for my future scientific research.

In the end

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Leon Kos and researchers from the University of Ljubljana and Irish Centre for High-End Computing for the online training courses. I learned a lot in the training week, especially the optimization of Python and parallel programming with MPI. In addition, I was honored to work with such a renowned organization in the field of HPC as EPCC over the summer. Although the COVID-19 prevented us from meeting each other on site, such a scene could not dampen our enthusiasm. What are you waiting for? Let’s get started! I wish everyone can harvest what they want:)

If you want to know more about me, please visit my LinkedIn and informal personal page. Looking forward to your message and communication!

Posted on by Irem Okur Posted in Blogs 2021 — No Comments ↓

Hello everyone! My name is İrem Okur. I am 21 years old and I’m from Turkey. I’m a third-year Computer Engineering student at Dokuz Eylül University. Some information about me; I love to travel and eat local food in the places I visit. Also, I love trying new things in every field. I will write about my experiences, here, while working with my amazing team.

While I was enthusiastically seeking a programme in which I can improve my programming skills along with fully contributing to the team, my professor emailed me about the PRACE Summer of HPC programme. That is where I learned about PRACE and the Summer of HPC programme. Especially after seeing PRACE prioritizing the future of software engineers, I knew that this programme would be a great opportunity for me. Once I found out that I was accepted for the programme I got so excited! I was selected for project reference 2114 which was my first choice because of my interests. The project’s name is “Re-engineering and optimizing Software for the discovery of gene sets related to disease” and its organization is EPCC in Edinburgh.

It is a big opportunity to work with supercomputers. With the help of the Summer of HPC Programme and Project 2114, I will learn about the process of optimising real-life problems. The project aims to re-engineer genomicper so that it can analyze larger and current data sets quickly. This programme will help me to see people from various cultures even it is online! Therefore this will also benefit me in a way that it will allow me to work with incredible people. Of course, while doing this, my programming skills will be increased too.

First Impression

My amazing fellow PRACE summer of HPC teammate Aybüke Özçelik and I met our Project Mentor, Dr. Mario Antonioletti; Project Co-mentor, Dr. Pau Navarro before the training week to get to know each other better. They were so helpful and understanding. This made me realize how lucky I am! I cannot wait to work with them after the training week. I am sure that we will be a great team!

Stay tuned for my next posts! Let the PRACE Summer of HPC programme begin!

Facebook
Twitter
Follow by Email