Posted on by Sanath Keshav Posted in Blogs 2020, Participants 2020
At the Mysore Palace (In my hometown)

Hi! I’m Sanath! I hail from the historic city of Mysore, India! I’m currently a Ph.D. student at the Stuttgart center of Simulation Science (SC SimTech), Universität Stuttgart. Previously, I was an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (EMJMD) scholar studying Computational Mechanics at Universität Stuttgart, and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona. I completed my Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani – Goa Campus, India.

I had the incredible opportunity of undertaking my Bachelor’s thesis at the Barcelona supercomputing center, which was my first formal introduction to HPC. This sparked an interest and exhibited immense potential with my brief experience. This was when I met two students who were then part of the summer of HPC. From a brief conversation, I was hooked and decided to do it myself in the future. And this was back in 2016! Flashforward to almost 4 years later, here I am, finally!

Although under very strange circumstances of a global pandemic, I am quite thrilled to be participating in the summer of HPC 2020. I will be working on project 2023 – Improved performance with hybrid programming at the Vienna Scientific Cluster. In the coming weeks, I will share regular updates on my progress, thoughts, and frustrations. I hope you join me on this journey! And finally, I leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

“ Compute, infer, tune, and repeat. “

– Unknown

Posted on by Shyam Mohan Posted in Blogs 2020

Hello everyone!! I am Shyam Mohan and the above picture is a fair reflection of how I felt when I was selected for this year’s PRACE Summer of HPC program (if you still don’t get it, absolutely thrilled!!!). I come from the extremely sunny climes of Chennai, a metropolis in the southern coast of India. Well then, how did I end up here you ask? The story begins in the tiny island nation of Bahrain, where I was born and did my schooling till tenth grade. As a kid, I used to be fascinated by puzzles and numbers and the wonderful little(!) world of mathematics itself. However, I shifted to Chennai after my tenth grade and did my final couple of years of schooling there. This is where I also picked up a fascination for gears, levers, crankshafts, cars and anything mechanical. Hence, I decided to do my undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering in Chennai itself. During my time toiling hard in the mechanical workshop of my institute, I stumbled upon the world of engineering simulations and then I thought ” Why sweat it out doing manual experiments in the blazing sun while you can do the same in the cozy confines of my room using nothing but a computer? ” . This was when I slowly deviated from hardcore mechanics to computational mechanics. I am now pursuing a Masters degree in Simulation Sciences at RWTH Aachen, Germany. This course introduced me to the magical world of scientific computing and in particular “High Performance Computing”. Inevitably, word about this program was doing the rounds in our WhatsApp groups and I decided to give it a shot. And the rest as they say is history!

High Performance Computing 1 – 0 COVID

Our training week was scheduled to happen in Vienna. Being an avid traveller, I was super excited to be able to visit a new city and interact with like-minded students and experts in the field and get to experience a different culture. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic meant that this could not be conducted in real time. But hey, who said we couldn’t simulate this virtually? Computing is something that can continue regardless of such circumstances and our tight-knit SoHPC community can certainly attest to that! I had a great time during the training week learning a lot about how coding can be done using supercomputers in a parallel manner. Also, the sports and yoga sessions in between had me catching my breath a bit!! As they say, a healthy body leads to a healthy mind!

All ready for the exciting summer ahead!!!

I will be working on an exciting project on parallelisation of plasma kinetic code at the LECAD Laboratory, Ljubljana, Slovenia. I am really thrilled to find out how my project progresses over the coming days. As my mentor says, “The sky’s the limit!”. If you would like to know more about the project and my experiences dealing with it, please stay tuned for my next posts!!!

Until then, this is Shyam signing off!!!

Posted on by Benedict Braunsfeld Posted in Blogs 2020, Participants 2020, PRACE Summer of HPC 2020

A new journey begins. What should I take with me? Normally I would start packing my luggage with underwear. One for each day and the extra one I still take with me even though I am 26. But how do journeys look like in times of Covid-19? In the age of remote exchanges, we travel digitally in an adventure of the mind. So all I need is a light baggage containing the desire to explore the vast lands of high-performance computing.

For a successful expedition, good preparation is key. Therefore, we were provided with our hosts from the Summer of HPC who prepared us for the upcoming challenges. We all met in Vienna for a week of training, organizing, and connecting with each other. Since I am currently concluding my master’s degree in chemistry at the Univerity of Vienna it was not too hard to imagine being in Vienna and meeting everyone. The training gave us fundamental tools that we may need and was providing a wide range of insights, starting with easy topics like parallelization of programs and going all the way to complex tasks like doing the eagle in a yoga session. Overall the training week was a pleasure since it was well organized and the lectures were entertaining with a lot of social activities in between.

After the training week, we were sent on the way to our port of call. In the case of Busenur, Sara, Berker, and me the destination is the Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC) in Dublin. After a short trip via google meet, we met with our supervisor Myles to plan the upcoming weeks. The atmosphere was welcoming and very supportive. After setting up, we now start with our project Quantum Genome Pattern Matching using Rigetti’s Forest API and our overall journey into the world of quantum computing, to a new world.

Posted on by Igor Abramov Posted in Blogs 2020

Hello %username%!

You are reading this text because either you know something about the SoHPC programme or you already know something about me. In both cases this article aims to give you a full puzzle of who I am and what is the programme I mentioned before.

Photo of me in a pre-virus era

My name is Igor Abramov and currently I am studying on a Computational Science and Engineering master program in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. During my bachelor I had a lot of courses on numerical methods and projects with usage of finite difference/elements/volume methods and I was always curious about how to boost them and make implementations more efficient. In my bachelor project for the first time I tried to parallelize python code with some high level libraries, but it didn’t give me a deep understanding of how it works. That’s why I started to attend related courses about parallel and high performance computing in university and decided to apply for PRACE Summer of HPC.

What is Summer of HPC?

Summer of HPC is a PRACE programme that offers summer placements at HPC centres across Europe to late stage undergraduates and/or master students. Applicants from across Europe are selected to participate each year, during the registration each candidate should specify the three most interesting projects for him/her. With a usual timetable students are gathering for the first training week and then moving to the HPC centre to which they were accepted till the end of August to do project.

Project selection procedure for accepted participants in a previous years
Photo by emrecan arık on Unsplash

Now with the post-virus era it is still impossible to organize this in a usual format so that’s why the organizing committee decided not to cancel the programme (huge thanks for that!) but to move it online! I think that it was the best possible decision in such a complicated situation.

That’s why all of  the participants virtually attended Vienna for a training week from 1 to 4 of July. We had lectures about computations and architecture of clusters in general, lectures about OpenMP, MPI and CUDA API and a lot of practical assignments. Also we had some online meetings with other participants and project mentors. It can’t replace live meetings and project collaboration but it is the safest possible way to spread knowledge and cooperate in current circumstances.

Project selection procedure was moved online this year.
She said G̶r̶y̶f̶f̶i̶n̶d̶o̶r̶ Jülich both for Josip and me

Project

Me and my colleague Josip were accepted for a project about Fast Multipole Method implementation for GPUs in a Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). This method is a numerical technique that was developed to speed up the calculation in the N-body problem. What are these N-bodies and how to juggle with them as fast as possible you will learn in a next post!

Stay tuned!

Posted on by Stefan Popov Posted in Blogs 2020

Hey there, Stefan here. I am writing this blog from Ljubljana, where I am doing my master’s degree at the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School. Before coming to Ljubljana, I had finished my bachelor’s at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, in the domain of computer science.

First thing that I did when I came to Ljubljana last September was to participate in the PRACE Autumn School where I attended sessions on big data technologies and HPC, following the advice of my studies’ supervisor. This is where I found out about the Summer of HPC program, and the PRACE organization.

This summer I will participate in the first-ever remote organization of the program, on a project conducted by CINECA, Bologna. The project encompasses the development of a tool for real-time analysis on the work of a HPC cluster at CINECA to detect anomalies and maximize the energy efficiency and maintainability of the cluster.

This image shows my "home" setup for working on the project
My workstation setup for this summer.

I am very excited to start my work on the initial phase, which is to implement a part of a pipeline that will load the data from the sensors at the cluster into the machine learning and visualization systems that will in turn, learn from the data to detect future anomalies and give the management better overview on the working state of the cluster.

There are a lot of moving pieces in this puzzle, and with remote work there exists the added complexity of coordinating with team members, but there is a solution to all of it and I am eager to find it.

I am excited to start working and collaborating both with the mentors and coordinators from CINECA, and with my fellow participants, Aisling from Ireland, and Nathan from the UK.

That is all for now. Feel free to write me (or add me on LinkedIn) if you want to know more about the program and / or my work here. You can also visit other participants’ pages to learn more about the Summer of HPC program, the PRACE organization and all the amazing work that will be done this summer.

Stay tuned for more, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share this with your friends.

Posted on by Petar Đekanović Posted in Blogs 2020

Well, hello and welcome to the first entry of this year’s Summer of HPC blog. My name is Petar and I would like to introduce myself and share some of my first impressions on SoHPC programme provided by PRACE.

Introduction

As I mentioned before, I am Petar Đekanović and I am born and raised in Belgrade, the capital of a small country located in Southeast Europe called Serbia. I am currently pursuing MSc degree in Software Engineering at University of Belgrade in Serbia.

Profile photo
SoHPC 2020 T-shirt and myself

I found a interest in high performance computing last year as I had attended a course on this topic. I remember being really moved by this new idea of executing the program not sequentially nor concurrently, but fully parallel using multiple computing nodes at the same time and as a consequence getting enormous performance gains.

Although I had an opportunity to use a “super” computer at my school, it was far from equipped to answer the needs of high-demand computational programs. Luckily, at the end of the course my professor shared with the students one HPC programme in which he had participated and, as you may guessed it already, I will be a part of.

And that is how it all started, but enough of me, let us fast-forward to the beginning of the summer of 2020.

Training week

Finally, the summer has started for all participants. But unfortunately, this year is the special one. Due to COVID-19 world pandemic, programme had to shift from its usual in-person format to remote participation.

Despite being online, first day went very well. All of us had an opportunity to meet with each other and exchange our opinions on this new kind of collaboration. We used different online tool such as Mural and Mentimeter to communicate and to learn, which I had not had a chance to use before.

Group photo
Training week’s group “photo” of all attendees and coordinators.

After the first introductory day, we began to explore essential technologies for program parallelization:

  • MPI – high performance Message Passing Interface library
  • OpenMP – shared memory based API for parallelism in C, C++ and Fortran programs
  • CUDA – parallel computing platform for computing on graphical processing units (GPUs)

Using these tools would not be of any help if attendees did not have an access to one of the most powerful clusters in Europe, VSC-3, courtesy of Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC). Using this cluster gave all of us a glimpse to what real state-of-the-art computer can do and with extensive help of all staff and coordinators, we successfully gained necessary training we needed.

Also, one of advantages of online training was that this year, for the first time, all applicants could join the training and benefit from it same as participants, which had been really amazing.

Although I did not get an experience that I would being there in person, the training week gave me a different view on how things could be done and definitely encouraged and as well prepared me for the next challenge – team project with my fellow colleague Roberto Rocco (if you are interested, you can take a look on his side of the story on his blog).

Conclusion

As you can probably suspect, this has only been a first look on how internship is being organized and my personal view on it so far. Thank you for stopping by and do not worry – new posts will come soon! Stay tuned!

Posted on by Francesca Schiavello Posted in Blogs 2020, PRACE Summer of HPC 2020

Hey there, I’m Francesca and I am one of the lucky participants of the PRACE summer of HPC, edition 2020. I did my bachelor studies in Applied Mathematics and after working for a few years I decided I wanted to go into Computational studies. I am currently doing a master in such a topic in the University of Amsterdam and University of Vrije, and early on in the master I found out about PRACE. The research projects offered and the opportunity to work and learn in one of the leading supercomputer facilities in Europe was an opportunity I could not pass up.

Several months later here I am, starting my summer adventure in Machine learning for the rescheduling of SLURM jobs in the Hartree Centre in the UK. Despite COVID19, the program moves on and I will be based in Rome whilst working on this project online. I am excited to learn as much as possible and after the first training week in CUDA, openMP and MPI and I am even more eager to do some hands-on work.

Besides my academic interests I am also quite an athletic person, and love to try all sorts of activities. Right now my go to sports are karate and soccer, but I really will try any sport. Fun fact, I am currently trying to learn how to do a handstand. If you have any tips for me drop them in the comments!

Lover of mountain and seas

Stay tuned for the development of this project. Ömer Faruk and I will be starting off with a review of the literature and studying some of the background theory, before delving into the machine learning applications themselves. The ultimate objective is to properly estimate execution times of user’s submitted jobs to Hartree’s clusters. Given that most users are not submitting optimal or correct estimations of the resources they need, it is our job to see if we can predict these run times more efficiently…for both a happier user and a happier, more efficient running cluster.

Posted on by Carlos Alejandro Munar Raimundo Posted in Blogs 2020
  • Visiting Italy
    Photo of me in front of the “Arco di Trionfo” in Italy.

First of all, I am Carlos Munar, I am 20 years old and I am studying at University of Almería, Spain. Although I study in Almería, I am from Palma of Mallorca, Balearic Islands, I have lived there since 18 years old that I moved to Almería. I am a part-time climber because with the study and the pandemic I have no time to practice it; and also I am very interested too in photography.

I am studying computer engineering and on september I will start mi forth year. I am specialising in IT category, but I am very interested in HPC, because I like very much mathematics (despite the fact that I am not soo good that I want).

Secondly, I first heard about HPC and parallel code on a subject called multiprocessors. I have learned about PThreads and MPI. I think it is very interesting because these things are what supports all the informatics nowadays. I mean, everyone wants to get more things done faster, and the hardware now is slower evolution than software. So, we need to focus on the hardware resources that we have already and make them faster and better. By using computers interconnected each other, and these computers are multicore, you will get a supercomputer that can do more work with the same time, and if the code that is running in parallel you will get even more performance.

Therefore, I have applied to a project called “Implementation of Parallel Branch and Bound algorithm for combinatorial optimization“, at University of Ljubljana which are the three topics that I like: parallel code, optimization of mathematical functions and algorithms. Consequently, when I first heard that I have been selected to this project I was very happy because with one stroke I hit everything that I like to get more knowledge.

In addition to this, I will be working on a real project of the real world, and with a real supercomputer. Also, I will know more people that are interested in the same things that I am. So, all were good news. Although, it will not be the complete experience of Summer of HPC because all will be telematic. But this is also a good new too because in the other case I would not meet İrem Naz Çoçan to work at the same project.

Posted on by Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail Posted in Blogs 2020

My story

Greetings everyone!
My name is Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail (too long, I know, friends call me Antonis) and I am excited to be a part of PRACE Summer of HPC this year.

I was born on May, 1999 in Thessaloniki, Greece, where I lived my childhood. My first contact with programming was in primary school, when our teacher presented us a way to make simple video games by connecting instruction blocks. My very first game was a cat moving around a room and although I have played a lot of more interesting and enjoyable games, I was truly thrilled about this one for a different reason; the creativity. And clearly, the fact that I could create anything I imagined and make it work (well, most of the times), made me feel like I was doing something extraordinary, something that to me felt like… magic. That was the moment when I realized how fun programming can be.

Later on, I constantly wanted to learn more about this new “magic” world I have discovered, so in high school, apart from developing more games, I also took courses in C, which was the first programming language I used. After that, I participated in several IT contests, in which of course I encountered problems more advanced than a simple Move-The-Cat game. This led me to realize that programming is not only fun, but also really powerful.

So, after this short back story, I am currently living in Volos, Greece, where I study Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of Thessaly. And in case some of you wonder why I chose Computer Engineering, the answer is simple; I needed to know how and why “magic” really works.

My SoHPC application background

Similarly to before, unveiling the “magic” around supercomputers was the motivation for me to apply for SoHPC 2020. To be honest, actually, this motivation emerged later, because at the time that I first learned about the programme, I did not know what HPC stands for. Then I realized that it refers to the really exciting field of High Performance Computing. I believe that every young engineer dreams to use supercomputers and I just could not let the opportunity slip out of my hands.

The “You have been selected” email

I was really anticipating that email and felt really excited when I received it.

Although I really wanted to be selected for the programme, I knew that many students have applied and so I believed that the chance to be selected was low. Because of that, I made the assumption that I might not have been selected and was thinking that there is always next year to try again. Of course, when I opened and read the email saying I was selected, all of these feelings were gone and I started to bounce off my chair full of excitement.

Little Quiz and conclusion

So here I am now after being selected to be a part of “Performance of Parallel Python Programs on New HPC Architectures” project organized by EPCC in Edinburgh, UK.

Before concluding, I have a little quiz for you.
How many cores do you believe that top supercomputers have?
Please write your answer/estimation down in the comments. Feel free to guess even if you have no idea, my initial guess was really wrong as I realized during the online training event in Vienna.

Last but not least, I would like to thank all of you that read my post, I hope you found it interesting and hope to see you in my future posts. After all, SoHPC has just began and until the end of the summer, there is so much magic ahead.

Posted on by Federico Julian Camerota Verdù Posted in Blogs 2020, PRACE Summer of HPC 2020

Hi there! My name is Federico and as you can probably guess from the title of this post I’m quite a nerd (not the kind that plays video games though)*. My studies and interest in computers led me to Summer of HPC (SoHPC), but let’s start from the beginning..

View of Trieste, Italy (Photo credits to my father A. Camerota).

About me

I’m Argentinian, but I’ve been living for several years now in Trieste, Italy. At the local university I got a bachelor’s degree in statistics and during that period I got very interested in programming. This passion pushed me to choose the master in data science and scientific computing I’m currently enrolled in. And there is where I met for the first time HPC.

In the first year, we had an introductory course on the foundations of HPC that also included some lectures on parallel programming using MPI, OpenMP and CUDA. I really enjoyed working through the assignments we had and running experiments on the cluster available for us. So when I heard about SoHPC it seemed like a great opportunity to make some experience in the field.

Unfortunately this happened after the 2019 applications had already closed. So I put a sticky note on my bedroom’s wall to remember about it for the next year. One year and half later, here we are at the second week of the SoHPC 2020.

Training week & the project

Italian trainee starter pack: 1. Computer 2. Big monitor 3. Fan

Last week we went through the training week, four days of lectures about blogging and parallel programming paradigms. Unfortunately, this year everything is done online but despite the hot weather (see above picture) it has been a wonderful experience.

We had the opportunity to learn the basics of MPI, OpenMP and CUDA and experiment with it using some cluster nodes reserved for us. Of course it would have been nicer to meet in person with the participants. But the organization was great and managed to make the training days interactive and involving for everybody.

This week we had the kick-off meeting with the site mentors and the projects started. I’ve been accepted for project 24 (Marching Tetrahedrons on the GPU ), we’ll be working on the implementation of an isosurface extraction algorithm running on GPU architectures. There are some interesting videos that show visually how a closely related algorithm (Marching Cubes) works and its application in computer graphics.

For the moment that’s all. Stay tuned for following updates on this SoHPC adventure!

Posted on by Denizhan Tutar Posted in Blogs 2020

Hello everyone! I’m Denizhan, I’m about to finish the first semester of my PhD. I’m working and studying at Istanbul Technical University, Computational Science and Engineering, which has a curriculum in which HPC and parallelization is especially emphasized. And yes, the semester still goes on and I still have a whole group project on reinforcement learning that is postponed a lot due to Covid-related reasons. But Summer of HPC already taught me a few useful tricks for working with CUDA, it contributes to my other academic work surprisingly fast!

(I’m not really good about photos, so here is one, please don’t be picky. Some of my body and some surroundings are involved in the context. Technical details: webcam, uncontrolled sunlight, cheese/linux, so I said cheese silently to thank programmers, and so on)

The training week was very well structured, a wonderful work for adapting to online enviroment. A great orientation day, followed by 3 modules on most important parallelization paradigms/techniques in the field. Course materials and hands-on exercises were well prepared, no prior knowledge was assumed but also it was not too simple for most of more experienced students. Various online tools were involved in the process, and I maybe took even more notes on them than actual subjects because I think there was many potential improvements on the course I assist as TA. I am especially thankful for organizers’ efforts to provide us a socializing environment in such challenging situation, and also for yoga and exercise sections. We programmers have a bunch of occupational problems (such as back ache and postural problems, and arguably lower social skills being more wide-spread and so on), but most educational/professional organization I saw chose to neglect it. When those problems are addressed, by lovely instructors, I felt a bit more important and more human, really! A better professional community is possible, a community in which we feel that those works are made for humans and we’re not born just to do them in a hurry, even in a pandemic. The effort put on those things, that are considered off-topic like a hobby or a luxury by some of us, pays off. I hope to see this more and more as I stick around for the following years in this area of occupation.

Now, I’m even more impatient for the project. It seems that I will work with wonderful mentors and co-worker. Our project is Development of visualization tool for data from molecular simulations, and I’m sure that it will be a good opportunity to practice my programming skills and widen my knowledge on molecular simulations.

I know that it would be considerably better for many things in regular conditions, face-to-face, meeting with people in person and so on; but summer of HPC exceeds my expectations from the start even online! I’m really excited for the rest of experience, and to tell you more here, so stay tuned!

Posted on by George Katsikas Posted in Blogs 2020

An Introduction to me!

Despite being away from huge computing centers, it’s still me!

Greetings everyone!

 My name is George Katsikas, I am 21 years old and I come from Greece. I am a Physics undergraduate studying at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, currently in my final year of studies. 

Ever since I was a child, I was always fascinated by all things science and I liked to apply the scientific method before I knew what that phrase even meant. Setting up little experiments and observing the behavior of systems as well as solving riddles and mathematical puzzles was a favorite pastime. In trying to understand the world around me (and due to my brothers’ contributions) I stumbled upon the land of programming at an early age too. I remember being amazed at the realization I could use this tool to create anything I wanted and although my creativity was limited, I would consistently engage in developing personal pet projects. 

This is Tasq, a simple iOS puzzle game of mine.

The natural next step for me, of course, would be to pursue education combining both natural as well as computer science. Being a jack of all trades as I am, I enrolled in a Physics study programme and continued to work on my projects. This parallel skill acquisition eventually also lead to an internship at my university’s IT center where I have contributed over the past one and a half years in creating UniverSIS, an open source SIS. Recently, my interest shifted towards machine learning and as a culmination of my studies, I decided to explore its application in a physics-oriented problem, that of material discovery.

Excerpt of my thesis, using Machine Learning to investigate magnetization in crystals.

Discovering PRACE

This exploration into the field of computational physics inevitably lead me to PRACE and the Summer of HPC. Despite the recent pandemic, we were fortunate enough that SoHPC was one of the few schools which could continue their operation. Indeed, I was thrilled to be selected in Project #02: Neural Networks in Quantum Chemistry, and since most of my projects have been small-scale, I view SoHPC as a grand opportunity to learn all about performant low level computing, parallelization and graphics acceleration. 

Right now, we find ourselves a few days after the training “week” ended. It was a very eventful 4-day period full of attending training sessions, competing in quizzes, chatting with colleagues, solving exercises collaboratively and even exercising together. I have personally never attended anything as well timely organized and as educational as this and thus it was a riveting experience. I can’t help but wonder how much more enjoyable everything would be were we to meet in person. During the training sessions I constantly wandered off thinking about possible optimizations I could use to my already existing programs; it had such a profound impact on me. Therefore, I would encourage anyone with even the slightest interest in programming to explore the world of HPC, especially through SoHPC.

  • Finishing second in a Mentimeter Quiz
  • Exploring parallel programming using CUDA

This is how a Physics undergraduate, uses applied Computer Science, modeling the Biological structure of the neuron to investigate quantum Chemistry, effectively creating an apex where “all of science meets”.

I promise to keep you updated on my experience through this wonderful journey and I will be sure to share all the exciting things there are to see therein.

Posted on by Seán McEntee Posted in Blogs 2020

About Me

Hi, my name is Seán McEntee, and I’m from a coastal town in the east of Ireland called Drogheda. I am 22 years old, and I recently completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics & Astrophysics at Trinity College Dublin. I have a strong passion for astronomy and programming, and I feel very privileged to be taking part in the PRACE Summer of High Performance Computing. My project will be based at the CINECA HPC facility in Bologna, and while it is unfortunate that the project could not be conducted on site this year, I still believe that there is much to gain from these two months. Hopefully I will get another opportunity to visit the facility in the near future!

A picture of me at the top of the Devil’s Ladder (appropriately named), a steep and difficult trail that leads to the peak of Carrauntoohil, which is the tallest mountain in Ireland. One of my more productive days!

When I’m not coding or scribbling down notes in lectures, the rest of my time mainly revolves around sport and keeping active. I enjoy running, and fortunately I live near the beach, where the views and sounds of the sea help to take my mind away from the aching pain in my legs and keep me going for that last kilometre. I am also fond of hiking, and on the right you can see a photo of me during my ascent to the summit of Carrauntoohil Mountain, the tallest in Ireland.

Lock down has also given me much more down time than usual, and I was finally able to binge watch some of the TV shows that I had missed out on over the years (most notably Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad).

Summer of HPC 2020

I heard about the PRACE Summer of HPC through my Computer Simulation lecturer at Trinity, and I was intrigued straight away. I had some prior exposure to parallel computing during my final year research project, when I ran simulations of supernova explosions interacting with the surrounding circumstellar medium (composed of the mass-loss from the progenitor star that was stripped away by the stellar wind in the years leading up to the explosion). This was a good starting point, but I wanted to learn more.

Fast forward to July, and I was beginning the SoHPC2020 training week, which was run by the team at the Vienna Scientific Cluster. This four-day intensive course gave all students a robust introduction to supercomputer architecture and hardware, software systems for transferring information between computers, and also some good tips regarding blogging and social media outreach. The opportunity to learn these technical skills and meet new people in the process made it a very enjoyable few days.

Group photo of lecturers and SoHPC students at the end of the training week hosted by the Vienna Scientific Cluster.

My Project @ CINECA, Bologna

For the project that I will be working on this summer, entitled “Visualization of supernova explosions in a magnetized inhomogeneous ambient environment”, I will be using the GALILEO system at the CINECA facility in Bologna (shown below). This supercomputer contains 1022 nodes, with 36 cores-per-node. Nodes are individual computers that consist of one or more CPUs (Central Processing Units) together with memory. For comparison, a Personal Computer is considered to be a single node and has a CPU with 4 cores.

The Galileo supercomputer rack in CINECA.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(supercomputer)

In the first part of my project, I will utilize the PLUTO MHD (Magnetohydrodynamics) code to perform some supernova explosion simulations. Then, I will analyze the data of these supernova-supernova remnant simulations using tools such as python and IDL (Interactive Data Language). Supernova remnants are the outcome of supernova explosions. They are extended sources that show a complex morphology and a non-uniform distribution of ejecta. Finally, I will incorporate the data visualization tool Paraview to produce some 3D models and movies of the supernova explosion and the subsequent supernova remnant. I’m really excited to see how these turn out, and I’ll be posting my results in future blog posts!

You can find more information about my project in its official description

Posted on by Joemah Magenya Posted in Blogs 2020

Hi everyone, I am Joemah Magenya currently pursuing master’s in Data Science. I am driven to learn more and become an expert of what I will have learnt and then share with the world. I am grateful to be part of SoHPC, an ecosystem determined to satisfy all desires to learning through guided project based tasks. As we journey together, I will be walking you through Time series monitoring of HPC job queues, as well as learn about CI/CD and some nice data visualizations. Stay tuned!

Posted on by Paddy Cahalane Posted in Blogs 2020, Participants 2020, PRACE Summer of HPC 2020

THE PAST

My name is Paddy Cahalane and I am a 22-year-old student from Dublin, Ireland. I have just completed my undergraduate degree in Astrophysics at Trinity College Dublin. As part of my undergrad, I did a 3-month research project in machine learning and I enjoyed it so much I decided to pursue this field further.

I heard about the Summer of HPC from a lecturer in a Computer Simulation module and I immediately knew I wanted to apply. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. Coming from a physics background I knew I would need to learn a large amount of technical skills for this project, but what better way to spend quarantine? I certainly can’t think of any!

THE PRESENT

I am currently based in my family home in the suburbs of Dublin. My Mam and Dad are also working from home so it’s a very comfortable environment. During the recent lockdown, I’ve been trying to keep myself occupied by learning new skills. I’ve been playing chess, practicing yoga, learning the saxophone, and running a lot in the parks and forests near my house.

Foggy run near my home.

But enough playtime; bring on the HPC!

THE FUTURE

After a very enjoyable training week learning all about blogging, MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA, I look forward to finally getting immersed in this program. My project is out of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and involves parallelizing plasma kinetic code with a task-based approach. I hope to gain useful knowledge for my Phd which I begin in September.

This post was just a short introduction to who I am but I’ll be back with regular updates with many more details on my project!

Posted on by Busenur Aktilav Posted in Blogs 2020
me, myself and I with my PRACE SoHPC T-shirt 🙂

Hello there, this is Buse. We will have a long journey throughout the summer so buckle up because it is gonna be, with an old friend’s expression, legendary! Well, this is my expectation based on the experience I have had with the PRACE SoHPC programme so far:) I’ll always be keeping you updated so that you can follow me on my adventure.

Let me first introduce myself and we will get back to the most exciting part later on. I am a senior computer engineering student at Izmir Institute of Technology. I am very interested in High-Performance Computing(HPC). This interest started a while ago when I participated in computer systems week in Edinburgh. I met with PRACE there and It was kind of an inspirational week for me. I decided to expand my knowledge about HPC and to do so I took a heterogeneous parallel programming lecture which is offered by my university. After successfully finishing the lecture, I couldn’t get enough of HPC so there was one more thing to do: starting a new project about HPC. Then I applied for the PRACE SoHPC programme and now here I am doing my internship with one of the most respectable institutions of Europe, ICHEC, thanks to PRACE SoHPC programme. I already feel like I have found “the one” for my career:)

Normally, the programme takes place on-site. However, it will be conducted remotely this year due to the pandemic. Throughout the summer, everyone will be working on a project of their desire (it is determined in the application phase) and I will be working on GPU acceleration of Breadth First Search algorithm in applications of social networks. Ideally, students work on projects individually. However, PRACE decided to assign two-three students for each project for this year. I am glad that we will be working as a team because I get to meet a wonderful teammate, Berker Demirel who is a senior CS student at Sabanci University. Every project has one or two mentors and a site coordinator. My mentor is Buket Benek Gürsoy who is a computational scientist in the Irish Centre for High-End Computing(ICHEC). She is an amazing mentor and always helps us if we have even the slightest doubt about anything. The second week is about to finish. Oh wait, I haven’t told you about the first week yet! 

Well, it was a great training week and I don’t think I can tell you the whole story in this post. Stay tuned for my next post to hear more about the training week.

If you would like to know more about PRACE SoHPC and my project, don’t forget to check out my blog! Stay safe and see you soon!

Posted on by Alexander J. Pfleger Posted in Blogs 2020, Participants 2020

”The Schrödinger equation explains everything but cannot explain anything “ – With this dilemma my solid-state physics professor addressed the limits of his course right in the beginning. The equation \hat H\left|\Psi\right> = E\left|\Psi\right>, so mighty yet so short, when applied on single atoms becomes analytically unsolvable without further simplifications. A numerical approach would also yield sufficient answers. Still for many-body-systems, like in heavier atoms or molecules, no solution can be found in a reasonable time.

I am Alexander J. Pfleger, a physics student from Graz, Austria. During my studies, I stumbled over similar problems quite frequently. The limiting factor was always set by the available computational power. I dare to say, my personal experience only covers a fraction of all existing problems of this kind. Solving some problems in the sectors environment, fusion energy, and health could improve human life drastically. Therefore, progress in HPC (High-Performance Computing) is useful and inevitable for the science of today and the humanity of tomorrow. This is the reason I joined the HPC programme “PRACE Summer of HPC”.

Currently, I am finishing my master’s thesis on simulations of a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) system. I am holding bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and audio engineering, and physics. In my free time, I organize the science competition PLANCKS. Or just play the piano. As you can see, I like to explore things. If you want to explore with me, stay tuned for my next posts.

Posted on by Sara Duarri Redondo Posted in Blogs 2020

Hi! In this post, I would like to introduce myself as a former participant of the Summer of HPC (SoHPC) 2020, hosted by the PRACE.

Who am I?

I am Sara Duarri Redondo, a 22-years-old geneticist who is currently finishing her masters in Bioinformatics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain).

Apart from my studies, I would say that most of my hobbies are art-centered: painting, music (I play the violin), drag, … so I love going to concerts and spectacles when possible.

When people ask me about my studies the next question usually is what is Bioinformatics? Bioinformatics its a field that combines Statistics, Computer Science, and Biology. In more plain words, it provides scientists the power and tools to analyze the amounts of biological data generated nowadays. Of course, it is a big field, and it can cover topics from drug design to population genomics.

Bioinformatics provides scientists the power and tools to analyze the amounts of biological data generated nowadays

If you ask me which part of Bioinformatics is my favorite one it has to be Computational Biology, which lets you develop skills such as algorithm-development and mathematical modeling.

What I am doing at SoHPC?

The reason I decided to apply to SoHPC was that I thought this was a great opportunity to work in a topic I am interested in, with new people, and in addition to this, improve my computational skills.

During these 2 months, I’ll be working on the project Quantum Genome Pattern Matching using Rigettis forest API, hosted by the ICHEC in Dublin (Ireland). Unfortunately, this year, work must be done remotely, from home.

Because SoHPC went online, for most of the projects, there will be two students (instead of one) working on the same project. Benedict and I will be working together on this project. In my opinion, working in pairs is a strong point that will help us to improve our teamwork skills and learn from each other.

I am really excited to start working on the project, due to the fact it would be my first time using Quantum Computation, and on top of that, the project has a direct application to genomics.

So, for now, that is every from me. I am looking forward to reading the other students’ presentations, and how their project progress through the summer. I will try to keep you updated about mine!

Happy summer and happy HPC!

Posted on by Kevin Mato Posted in Blogs 2020, Participants 2020

Hello dear reader, welcome to my series of posts about HPC!
The Blog of “Summer of HPC 2020” will be full of news in the upcoming months, you will be able to follow 24 cutting edge projects on different matters regarding high perfomance computation.

About me

I’m Kevin!
I’m a 23 y.o. student of computer science and engineering from the north of Italy, close to Lake Maggiore.
During my studies at the Polytechnic of Milan I had the opportunity of trying my hand at very different types of projects and I discovered a deep love for data science and statistics, as well as for computer architectures and physics. I discovered a way in which I could have combined them all together: High Performance Computing!
In the last year I’ve been working on topics related to quantum computing, but during SoHPC 2020 I will be participating to project 2023, “Improved performance with Hybrid Programming”. This project will be hosted by the Vienna scientific Cluster, and we will be able to work remotely on the machines Vienna Scientific Clusters 3 and 4.

Lake Maggiore. Lombardia. Italy. (Five minutes away from where I live).

Project & Training week

My project will be about hybrid programming in MPI, OpenMP and eventually CUDA. I had basic knowledge of the technologies involved before applying and I’m looking forward to explore how we can exploit them to achieve great results on the iterative Jacobi solver. I am sure that by the end of this experience I will be a completely different person and possibly I will be able to pursue a career in HPC as I am willing to do. A special thanks goes to our mentors and the organizers of the training week that did an absolute great job. The clarity of the explanations of the mentors met the preciness of the organizers, resulting in a perfect balance between work and fun; even if working remotely can happen to be frustrating, this time I can call the training week a success.

For news on the project and my personal achievements you will find everything here!

————–The author: Kevin Mato———–

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-mato-657444173/
Github: https://github.com/KevinMTO

Posted on by Clément Richefort Posted in Blogs 2020, Participants 2020
Grad Beč dobio moćno superračunalo - Ekovjesnik

Hi everyone, I am Clément Richefort, a 21 years old french enthusiastic in both High Performance Computing and Linear Algebra. I am studying at the Polytechnic Engineering School of the University of Lille, and now enrolled in the 2023 project organized by the Vienna Scientific Cluster (you obviously know my mentors Claudia and Irene if you attended the Summer of HPC training week). The Summer of HPC is a perfect match with my willingness to become a researcher in that field ! Indeed, as a graduated engineer in 2021, I would like to start a PhD related to these topics. Beyond HPC, I am deeply interested in science in general, literature and philosophy.

Even if I were supposed to see the Vienna Scientific Clusters 3 & 4 in real life, my place is still very pleasant to live in as you can see :

Where I was supposed to work. (Vienna Scientific Cluster 4 – Vienna, Austria)
Where I actually am. (Arradon – Brittany, France)

It is a bit frustrating to not be able to meet in real life with my mates and mentors because of the containment, but the online-program is well organized by the different hosts, so we still have a lot of fun and nice learning outcomes behind our webcams and slack accounts.

The project by itself seems really interesting since I only had some basic experience with distributed memory systems and pure MPI. I am eager to learn more about the combination of both MPI and OpenMP and then adapt the different codes I have already written into a context of hybrid programming : such as GMRES, Incomplete LU Factorization, etc.

Stay tuned for the news related to the project and my personal improvements !

GitHub Account : http://github.com/Protoniac

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