My name is Jakub Nurski. I am an ambitious B.Eng student of Computer Science in Poznan University of Technology in Poland. I also work there for a small start-up that provides innovative software for photovoltaic companies. Bringing green energy to people is one of my lifelong goals.
Always thinking of something, either computer related or not.
During my studies I’ve participated in many hackathons. “What is a hackathon?” you may ask.
Design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development collaborate intensively on software projects. It typically last between a day and a week.
Wikipedia
Together with my team we have created video games, a study help app, a first aid app, a social media app, an e-commerce app and many more. 24 hour work without sleep is really rewarding. Especially if you work with determined people and win some prizes.
However, programming is not my whole life (and it will never be – I hope). In my spare time I like to design and play board games. Day-to-day board game meetups in a fun group is a great way to recharge you batteries for a week. Moreover, I prefer to spend my holidays in mountainous areas which allow me to pursue one of my greatest passions – hiking.
On the summit of Sněžka, Czech Republic.
I feel enthusiastic about the PRACE Summer of HPC program. I hope that I’ll learn a lot during my project about visualisation. I also hope that my work will help the public to understand how important HPC is for science.
Hello Readers, as might be suggested by the title of this post, here I’ll try to introduce myself and also give a glimpse of what this amazing experience called the PRACE Summer of HPC program probably has in store for me.
Me at Karnspitze, Sarntal, Italy during last summer
My name is Paras Kumar, I’am a 27 year old mechanical engineer turned computational scientist who is currently pursing his Masters in Computational Engineering (sounds similar to Computer Engineering, actually it is not, so please click to know more) at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Erlangen, Germany. My scientific interests lie in the development of numerical methods for solving complex problems in Mechanical Engineering, especially Solid Mechanics. Put simply, I may for instance, be interested in determining under what loading conditions could the axle of your car or the landing gear of an airplane fail. One could build prototypes and do physical tests, but this requires a lot of effort, money, time and may even be infeasible in certain cases. Thus, we resort to the numerical route, which involves some complex equations of maths which cannot be solved by hand so one has to write computer programs for that. High Performance Computing (HPC) is concerned with using powerful supercomputers to solve such complex problems.
Born and brought up in New Delhi, India, I did my schooling and undergraduate studies there. Post Bachelors, I worked for three years in an automotive company where I was involved in strength and durability analysis (something similar as described above) for design of motorcycle structural parts. These calculations are based on a mathematical technique called Finite Element Method and in the industrial context are generally implemented using commercially available software programs. The competencies and passion to excel, which I developed while working there was indeed a turning point in my professional life. An avid thinker and curious mind as I have always been, I decided to sound the depths of how these software tools actually work behind the scene to present the engineer with colorful pictures containing some important information. This pursuit of excellence, as I consider it led me to pack my bags, leave my family and friends and come all the way to Erlangen, Germany where I now live for the past two years.
Besides solving problems in Mechanics, I am also engrossed in hiking, travelling places, trying different cuisines, watching movies, playing chess and table tennis. Last year, I got the opportunity to go hiking in the Sarntal Alps in the South Tyrol area of Northern Italy. Also, I look forward to see new places during my stay in Slovenia over the summer. By the way, I already had the opportunity to taste traditional Slovenian food on my way to Ljubljana and it was yummy.
At the Triple Bridge in Ljubljana, Slovenia during last weekend
Now on the verge of completing my masters studies, I perceive the PRACE Summer of HPC program as a unique opportunity to further develop my skills in Computational Science and this time apply them to a different application – CFD, as I spend the summer at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in the University of Ljubljana trying to come up with a strategy to automate the complete CAD – CFD process involving the application of Open CASCADE and OpenFOAM. Last week, I along with twenty other participants attended an introductory training event at the IT4Innovations Supercomputing Center in Ostrava, Czech Republic. This training not only allowed us to try our hands at the Salomon Supercomputer, but I also got to meet a bunch of amazing people from different parts of Europe, interact with different cultures and make friends. I hope to pursue this further during my stay in this beautiful city of Ljubljana.
Welcome to the PRACE Summer of HPC website! My name is Philippos and I am one of the current participants. I have done my Bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Cyprus and my Master in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. My computing interests range from computer architecture and high-performance computing to machine learning. I also find other science subjects very interesting such as physics and mathematics. A fascinating fact about the Summer of HPC program is that the majority of the projects combine different disciplines and this is the main reason I decided to apply.
My home country is Cyprus. In Cyprus we have a supercomputer at the Cyprus Institute that I have used in multiple occasions. It is amazing to think of what can be achieved with parallelisation in such a relatively small supercomputer. For example, on a typical utilization of the supercomputer you can run a workload of around 10.000 CPU hours in about a day. This essentially means that you can run an experiment that takes over a year to calculate in a single-core computer in one day. As the problem size scales, as well as when we move to bigger supercomputers, we can achieve more previously-unfeasible tasks in a small amount of time.
In my free time I like to listen to classical music. Some of my favourite composers are Bach, Fauré, Brahms and Duruflé. My music theory knowledge is limited, but I find the mathematical aspects of some pieces very interesting. In addition, I used to play the violin as a hobby and it is amazing how many different sounds a single instrument can produce. Each violinist has a unique way of expressing a piece of music and the interpretation may be influenced from the player’s experiences, the wood with which the violin was made, the string selection etc. My question would be whether an artificial neural network could be trained to reproduce a specific player’s playing ability given only the music score for different pieces. It would be surely a complex application and a single conventional few-core computer would probably be insufficient for this amount of computing.
Computer science is a rapidly evolving field and doing related research can be very fascinating. I look forward to begin experimentation with my project at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.
Friends quote: “A Cypriot programmer that has enthusiasm about a variety of things such as mechanical watches and computers.”
You can find more of my interests and some publicly available software (including a 3D N-Body simulator and a twilight calculator) by checking out my personal website: ucy.philippos.info.
My name is Edwige Pezzulli, I am a girl coming from the Eternal City – Rome, where I live with my wonderful dog, Moja. Currently, I am finishing my Ph.D. in Astrophysics at University La Sapienza.
Me in Monument Valley
During my studies, I visited many cities and spent three months in Paris, a city I fell in love with.
My research studies the formation of and growth of the first supermassive black holes – monsters with enormous mass, up to 10 billion times the mass of our Sun, formed when the Universe was very young.
However, stars and galaxies are not my sole interest. I love traveling all over the world (my last trip was in the “autentica Cuba”) physically, but also by reading. I am a cinephile, and I like sports such as rugby and boxing/MMA – a full-contact combat sport I only recently discovered. I do volunteer work with young inmates and I would like to hold astrophysics seminars in jails. I am vegetarian, love animals, nature, enthusiasm and knowledge, and I am firmly convinced that the key to progress resides in the promotion of diversity.
Moja in Parc de Sceaux, Paris
I am pretty excited to work with climate visualization, which is the topic of my project. I will spend the next two months at the Aristotle University, in Thessaloniki, a city full of cultural life and events. The project has a lot of possible applications, much more concrete with respect to my Ph.D. studies – but I don’t like to ask myself if something is just “useful”.
Visualizations bring intuition to researchers on how climate systems behave and are also important in communicating the problem of climate change to the public. In fact, possible advancements towards a more green future start from the knowledge of the effect of our actions on Earth’s climate (and eco) system.
My name is Mahmoud, originally from Egypt, and currently a PhD student at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). I have been enjoying my time very much in Ireland. I love the vibrant campus of NUIG, and the relatively simple life in smaller towns like Galway City. I am joining a Summer of HPC project at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.
Being on the lookout for taking part in research-related projects, I am very glad to join the Summer of HPC program. I particularly get a thrill out of doing research, and developing new ideas. My enjoyment extends in the case of inter-disciplinary research projects that can jointly synthesize different fields (e.g. computing and life sciences). I expect to experience such inter-disciplinary advantages during the summer project, where I will be working closely with a climate scientist.
The Quadrangle, NUIG
With regard to my PhD research, it mainly involves simulation modeling along with machine learning (ML). We attempt to develop a hybrid approach that integrates simulation models with ML. At its core, our approach is based on the premise that a system’s knowledge can be partially captured and learned in an automated manner, aided by ML models. We conceive that the proposed approach can help lead to self-adaptive simulation models that can learn to change their behaviour in accordance with changes in the real-world system’s behaviour.
Besides computing and research, I have always been keen on learning about arts, particularly drama and theatre arts. I enjoy reading plays, and watching theatre very much. I also studied drama at the Academy of Arts in Cairo. I deeply believe that studying a quite different discipline has widened the breadth of my knowledge.
My favourite quote is “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”, Benjamin Franklin.
With the SoHPC participants, Leon, Zheng, and Karina inside IT4I , Ostrava.
Have a look at my intro video shot inside the IT4Innovations supercomputing facility in Ostrava, Czech:
“A typical German guy”. That is me, Anton Lebedev, according to my co-conspirator Aleksander Wennersteen, who will be joining me at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in Spain to work in the domain of general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU) programming.
And now, true to the description given above, the description of myself and my project shall follow suit.
A first generation immigrant to Germany from Ukraine, I have finally obtained a MSc in physics at the University of Tübingen after an initial stint at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Now I consider myself a free radical at my current institution – a student still, but looking for an interesting PhD position. I pledge no allegiance to anybody anymore.
Since at the time of this post the summer term and lectures are still ongoing in Tübingen, I will be a remote teaching assistant during half of the PRACE Summer of High Performance Computing (SoHPC) program.
My field of study was and remains theoretical electrodynamics with elements of general (or geometric) relativity. In the course of my work and due to careful theoretical analysis
Thinking (or pretending to think) about the code during the introduction week.
I was able to reduce the computational cost of the numerical methods used in my thesis, therefore there was no need to use high performance computing for in the not-so-distant past.
This reduction in complexity left me wanting to work in high performance computing again – at least for a while. Thus I have applied for the PRACE “Summer of High Performance Computing” program.
I was quite surprised to have been selected for the project I will be doing in the upcoming weeks, since I do not consider myself to be a prolific programmer. I aim, in part, to use this opportunity to compare and evaluate the work ethics and methodology I have acquired in Tübingen in an international setting.
As to the project, I will be porting and optimizing existing parallel code which implements Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo methods for computing approximate solutions to linear systems of equations to take advantage of NVIDIA GPUs. These solutions will then be used as so-called preconditioners for iterative solvers (i.e. conjugate-gradient solver) for very large linear systems which occur, among other things, in almost all engineering simulations.
The performance analysis of the resulting code will be carried on the technologically bleeding-edge cluster that is Mare Nostrum 4 at the BSC.
Adjusting the settings for optimal pictures at the beautiful Nasir al Mulk mosque in Shiraz (Iran). (Image provided by Marc Sindlinger)
In my time off I enjoy a few things. Chief amongst them is road-racing. Along with Aikido, it helps to keep me in shape – at least to some degree. As to the arts, I practice photography whenever I expect interesting motives to be found and if time permits.
A particular quirk of mine is my focus on cybersecurity and privacy, which makes any publication a drawn-out iterative procedure. But I still think that it is worth the extra work, for the less the internet knows about oneself – the better .
Bike tour to a place with a collection of well-preserved historic windmills and houses during my ERASMUS semester in Amsterdam
Hi, my name is Jan Packhäuser, and I am a 23 year old student from Germany. I was born and raised in a small Bavarian town called Miltenberg which is located close to the border of the federal states Baden Wurttemberg and Hessen. After graduating from a school with an IT profile with a university entrance diploma, I decided to move to Ulm to study mathematical economics.
While studying at the University of Ulm I was interested in numerical mathematics, especially in solving optimal control problems. At an early stage of my studies I noticed how time-consuming computations can be and this channeled my interest more and more toward the field of high performance computing.
During the PRACE Summer of HPC program, I will spend two months at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of University of Ljubljana, to work on a parallel algorithm for non-negative matrix tri-factorization.
In my leisure time I enjoy playing chess or doing sports. Also, I likes music a lot and play the trumpet.
I am really looking forward to this summer. Besides working on an interesting research project I want to discover everything that Slovenia can offer. On our way from Ostrava to Ljubljana Leon, Paras and me have already spent an enjoyable afternoon in the mountains. This has been a decent foretaste yet.
In the mountains, north-western area of Slovenia, together with Leon in the middle and Paras to the right.
Here you can find a small video that has been taken during the introduction week in Ostrava at the supercomputing center IT4Innovations.
I’m 23 years old and in my third year of the five year MPhys in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. This summer, I will be participating in the Summer of HPC, based at the Barcelona Supercomputing center.
Originally from Norway, I couldn’t tell you the precise reason I decided to follow the thousand year old Norwegian tradition of conquering the British isles, nevertheless, it is going according to plan. I shall finish my ancestors work!
Academically, my interests range from the abstract corners of Mathematics, through Physics to Computer Science. This is the reason I have decided to leave the safe cocoon of theoretical physics and maths to go to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) to learn more about Deep Learning (DL) and visualisation. My project title is “Monte Carlo and Deep Learning Methods for Enhancing Crowd Simulation“.
I chose to participate in the PRACE SoHPC program both due to the cool project I got, and the prospect of meeting more people from around Europe. We are representing most of Europe, from Finland to Spain, and the UK to Greece. The main point separating SoHPC from other Europe wide summer programs, is the wide variety of fields we are coming from. There are Naval Engineers, Computer scientists, Chemists, Physicists, Mathematicians and so on. In academia, you seldom meet people from such a wide range of fields, so this is truly an amazing experience.
Apart from my wide academic interest, I consider myself an avid traveler and hiker. Below are some of my more recent highlights that were pictured.
Walked up this random hill near Munich for an hour or so, then we found this view!
Actually, this was taken just a 15 minute walk from one of the main north south roads in Norway!
Hello World.f95, my name is Dimitra Anevlavi and I am from Greece. I am 22 very proud years old 🙂 and I am currently in my 4th year of studies in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. Since I was a little girl, I was inspired by science and mathematics. I strongly believe that my grandfather, who was also an Engineer, had an impact on my decision to follow these studies with his intelligence and love for creation.
In my first steps at the university I discovered my passion for Computational Engineering while working on semester projects. Many of my Professors played an important role in inspiring me in this field and continue to do so up to this day. I am quite fond of Computational Fluid Dynamics and I am currently working on my diploma thesis on the modeling of deformable hydrofoils that operate under the sea surface and harvest energy from
waves. I guess that body-fluid interaction for modeling oscillating hydrofoils and biomimetics will be my thing in the next few years. For that reason, I take numerical methods by hand and jump right into the water. The PRACE Summer of HPC program is a unique opportunity for me. Not only because it is actually my first project abroad but also because it is full of new and exciting parallel programming techniques, which I will definitely implement in my thesis. During the summer internship I will be working on the development and validation of real-time earthquake hazard models at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPCC).
550 km of backpacking to go until we reach Santiago de Compostela 🙂
In the future, I am looking forward to becoming a young researcher and contribute to society by improving peoples lives. It is what you pursue in life that keeps you motivated, so I guess I really am “the girl who is smiling and computing what it takes to keep her ship sailing”. One of the first tasks an engineer does is to identify the physical problem that needs to be solved and then after evaluating many parameters, to come up with a plan to produce the desirable results in a cost-effective amount of time and resources. For that reason, I look forward to use the knowledge that I have gained in order to produce results that can benefit society in general. But you have to broaden your horizons for that and think outside the box, right?
For this reason, traveling is also one of my favorite things to do, since every time you discover a new place you are also discovering important things about you as well. In 2015, I followed by best friends in a pilgrimage in Spain, the Camino de Santiago that had as a starting point Pamplona and as a final destination the famous city in La Coruna- Santiago de Compostela. Walking 300 km with backpacks sounded extremely difficult for me but support from loved ones and determination was all I needed to keep going. Since then, I grasp every opportunity I get to travel around the world, learn more about cultures, music, cuisine, history and people.
I will keep you all up to date about my new adventures in Scotland! Lots of Python code awaits me 🙂
Hint : Check out my introduction video!
and a cool collaboration with my friends Sam, Jamie and Andreas 🙂 Cheers
Awright troops, my name’s Jamie and I’ve been from Glasgow my entire life.
Currently I’m doing my PhD at the University of Glasgow, researching the way viscosity in the solar atmosphere interacts with the magnetic field there. As part of this work I attempted to secure funding for a research trip to the sun but apparently it’s too warm this time of year, even at night.
Since my funding fell through, I decided to feed my inner masochist and apply for the PRACE Summer of HPC (high performance computing) program, mainly for three reasons. Firstly, being forced to be paid to work on a fascinating project on radiosity in computer graphics in another country sounds simply awful. Secondly, I unfortunately love playing music, as you can read below, so the idea of heading to Dublin, a hub of Irish folk music, fills me with the most foul feelings of dread. Lastly, I really do hate people so traveling to Ostrava in the Czech Republic to meet and work with a horribly wonderful bunch of people just seems like hell.
Seriously though, as we say in Glasgow, I’m pure mad buzzin’, pal.
Jimbles The Science Guy
So you already know my main work in my PhD, in a field called magnetohydrodynamics, but I’ve dabbled in a fair few areas over the years. I did my undergraduate integrated masters in both Maths and Physics so for my Masters thesis I investigated double diffusive convection, where a difference in temperature and a difference in salinity in water, for example, leads to some interesting fluid flows and some rather cool patterns. Moving a little bit earlier, my Bachelors dissertation focused on 2-dimensional topological quantum field theories. Turns out 2D topological quantum field theories are not so interesting to me and not particularly useful to anybody else.
A Wee Bitty Fiddlin’
At the tail end of 2013 I picked up the fiddle (violin) again and started playing traditional music. First the kind of cheesy trad(itional) tunes you find at a typical Scottish ceilidh, then I branched into the wonderful Glasgow trad session scene (sessions are held in pubs or cafes and you go along and just sit down and play, often for a few free drinks, kind of like a cooperative open mic night) and found all sorts of amazing contemporary tunes, along with some banging tunes written yonks ago. In 2015 I was privileged to lead the Glasgow University Folk Music Group and since then my friend Ayden and I have started a duo, creatively named Jamie ‘n’ Ayden. We’ve played in a number of gigs around Glasgow, playing mainly our own compositions and we even managed to find ourselves on the radio during this years Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s folk music festival! Check out one of our tracks below and you can find our Facebook page here, our soundcloud here and some of my own compositions here!
If you want a wee taste of some other interesting Scottish folk, check out Imar:
Or Elephant Sessions if you fancy a bit of rock fusion:
Or even EDM style Niteworks:
Art? Aye, Art.
Just recently I’ve gotten extremely interested in computer art, specifically generative art produced by ideas from mathematics and the natural sciences. It’s a wonderful mix of coding, science and art that allows me to express myself creatively, beyond my music and allows me to explore artistic ideas without being bogged down by my truly abysmal drawing skills. As part of a talk I recently gave on this kind of computer art, I wrote a few wee online toys for making some of the neat images you can check out below. They’re nice to look at but it’s more fun to go play with them yourself so go check them out here!
Sound wave-like pattern from the y-coordinate of a double pendulum. This is an example of taking data from a chaotic system and making it visually interesting. Have a wee play about yourself here.
A Julia fractal, one of the classic examples of mathematical art. This was made while trying to introduce myself to the web programming tool WebGL so please don’t look at the code on my github if you’re that way inclined. It’s awful. Do play with the fractals yourself here though!
Chaotic particle paths in the famous example of chaos theory, the Lorenz attractor. This was one of the first ever examples of a chaotic system but is extremely simple, consisting of just three short equations and giving some really interesting behaviour. As with the rest of these pieces, you should so totes omg go check it out here.
Fractal produced from the regular expression “.*[13|24].*”. Have a play with the randomly generated ones over here!
You can read about these and some of my other projects on my personal blog at jamiejquinn.com!
So, I’m supposed to write a blog about myself and my project during the summer. I have no idea what to type and I suddenly feel a real kinship with this dog.
Truthfully, I’d much rather hear about you, what are your interests? Tell me in the comments, I’m a great listener (well…… I’ve perfected the smile and the nod).
Ok, where to start? I’m told your name is usually a good way to begin these things, mine’s Andreas. I’m a 22 year old chemistry graduate hailing from tropical Birmingham, England.
Insert interesting fact about myself.
One thing that people always tell me is that I’m very photogenic, demonstrated perfectly by the picture below….
Why? I’m the guy smiling with only half his face in case you were wondering
If you were to ask what inspired my passion for all things science I wouldn’t be able to point towards a specific person or moment (although both of my parents hate science, so maybe I subconsciously followed this path as an act of rebellion?). I don’t think the why really matters, just that I’m here now and I get to work with really, really, (one more really? I think so) really big computers.
Computers, chemistry and caffeine
When I tell people I’m a chemist, they usually assume I make drugs or blow stuff up (maybe its just the vibe I give off?) so I wouldn’t be surprised if right now you’re asking yourself what a chemist is doing in a program about high performance computing. I’m a actually a computational chemist. That just means I do in-silico experiments rather than in a laboratory (you could say that I actually do make drugs and blow stuff up…… just from the safety of my computer). Computational chemists concern themselves with the fundamental properties of atoms, molecules and chemical reactions. Essentially we develop code to simulate molecules and solids (for example we might simulate ice melting).
Like computer scientists, we develop code and ingest copious amounts of caffeine, however, we can also tell you the molecular structure of caffeine (aka 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, shown below), how to make it and how it works (take that computer science!).
As a chemist it’s obligatory to post a chemical structure
Over the summer I’ll be working at the Computing Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences on the parallelization of software that models nanotubes using the Hartree-Fock method. My first task is to use MPI to parallelize the code. If successful, the next step would be an MPI + OpenMP hybrid implementation. My plan for this blog is to post updates on my project, and any excursions I may take over the summer (if I have time I might also write a series of posts describing what the Hartree-Fock method is, but I haven’t fully committed to that yet).
So, come back for that (or don’t, I can’t force you to keep reading this blog), in the mean time here’s a video that some of us made to celebrate all the parallel programming we’re going to be doing over the summer.
Hi, my name is Sam Green and I’m from a small city called Waterford in the South of Ireland.
A photo of me while at the cliffs on the island of Malta. A large portion of my childhood was spent exploring the local beaches in the south of Ireland so I think this is a fitting photo to show I have a life outside of academia.
I grew up in the countryside surrounding the city (technically Kilkenny countryside but lets not get into those sort of details) and until a few years ago didn’t see life outside of there. I finished secondary school while I was 17 and got the grades I needed to enter the college of my choosing.
This lead me to the big Dublin City, Ireland’s capital city if you’ve never heard of us, to do a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics and Astrophysics at Trinity College Dublin. During my 4 year course here I discovered my passion for astronomy, computers and more importantly the desire to be a researcher. This was mainly due to research I carried out during my final year where I worked on code to model the differential emission measure (the amount of material emitted at different temperatures) of delta-spots (highly magnetized sunspots) during a solar flare event on the Sun. I decided a Masters degree would be important in achieving my goal of entering academic research and so I entered a MSc program called Space Science and Technology at University College Dublin. This course (eventually) proved to be an important decision for my academic career – mainly due to the 3-month internship that was required to complete the degree.
This leads me to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS, to see more please visit https://www.dias.ie). I began an internship in DIAS working on a small project with a guy named Jonathan Mackey (soon to be my PhD supervisor). His research, in a nutshell, involved massive stars and their explosions as supernovae at the end of their lives (if you’d like to know more please visit https://homepages.dias.ie/jmackey/research.html). I began working with a code he created called pion, which is a grid-based fluid dynamics code for simulating the circumstellar medium around massive stars. I used this to create simulations of stellar wind bubbles around massive stars. This is where I was first introduced to high performance computing and began using the computing facilities at ICHEC. Over the next 3 months I learned more and more about HPC, Python, C++ and parallel computing (oh and of course physics) and how I felt I was in the right area of research. So I applied for a PhD position within DIAS and by the end of the internship I got a 4-year scholarship to continue of my research as a PhD student.
Photo of Dunsink Observatory in Dublin, Ireland. The image shows the main observatory building where the famous mathematician William Rowan Hamilton used to live while he was a professor in Trinity College Dublin.
Since I started my PhD about 7 months ago, I have continued to work on 2-dimensional simulations of massive stars and how they interact with their surroundings. My current work involves modeling the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) and trying to understand its formation and hence create a model to describe it. DIAS also runs and maintains an observatory on the outskirts of Dublin called Dunsink Observatory. Now if I didn’t mention anything about this place I think Hilary (Hilary O’Donnell organizes all the public outreach that goes on within Dunsink) would kick me out. Since September, I have been voluntarily helping out at public events and workshops held here. Since then, I have developed talks that I now give on a regular basis to the general public, schools and college societies (ask David Bourke). I also work on a meteor camera system that monitors meteors entering the Earth’s atmosphere (see Nemetode.org for more information).
During the beginning of my research, my supervisor sent me an email about the advert
Working hard during a hands-on session at the Summer of HPC training with in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
of PRACE’s Summer of HPC program and how this could be a good way to further my knowledge of HPC and get a chance to do a project outside of Ireland. Of course I jumped at the idea and submitted my application. Within a few months I was picked to do a project at EPCC in the University of Edinburgh working on a project entitled “Interactive weather forecasting on supercomputers as a tool for education”. This project caught my interest because every aspect of it includes things I am interested in. I have always been curious at how weather forecasts are modeled and how supercomputers are used to do this. I also look forward to learning how this type of computing can be used for education. My time at Dunsink Observatory has taught me the importance of outreach in astronomy and science as a whole. I know the next 2 months will both exciting and educational!
My name is Alessandro Marzo and I’m from Pesaro, Italy. If you never heard if it, just know that it is famous for two things: 1) it is the birthplace of the famous Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini and 2) it’s the only place in Italy where you will find mayo and boiled eggs on a pizza, named after the composer himself.
I’m currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Applied Physics at the University of Bologna, focusing on Medical Physics and High Performance Computing. I’ve always loved Physics so much that during my studies I struggled to choose one topic to focus on and I switched fields a couple of times. That is until I discovered High Performance Computing! To me HPC is the perfect balance between theory and experiments. Carrying out a computational simulation of some complex physical process (that can match experimental results) allows you to have a higher form of understanding of the phenomenon, while acquiring practical knowledge in the meantime. And in hindsight, I realized this is the reason that I first decided to study Physics, and the reason why after my Master studies I intend to pursue a Phd in Computational Physics.
But that’s not everything about me! I also love hiking and enjoy long walks in the city or by the beach. While at home, I like to spend my free time reading books and watching movies and TV shows. I am a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, but I also like Lars von Trier, so I am pretty excited to visit the country where he comes from this summer!
Me hiking in the Dolomites
I am going to spend the summer in Denmark – the happiest country of the world, at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen working on the project Tracing in 4D data. My task is to implement a parallel version of tracing algorithms for muscle tissue in 3D over time to study and visualize the fast micrometer scale internal movements of small animals, in my case blowflies, while they try to escape from lethal doses of radiations that we need to make nice pictures of them!
Here’s me presenting in parallel with my friend Konstantinos Koukas:
My name is Konstantinos Koukas and I am a 22 years old student from Athens, Greece. I am currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. I plan to graduate in the summer of 2018 and intend to continue my further studies towards a Master’s degree. My research interests include Database Systems, Data Mining, Big Data, Distributed and Parallel Computing as well as Machine Learning. I have been working as a teaching assistant in the undergraduate course ‘Introduction to Programming’ of my university for the past two years.
During my studies, I attended a parallel computing class where I was fascinated by the ability of unlocking the potential processing power of modern computers using parallel programming techniques. This is why I decided to apply to the PRACE Summer of HPC programme and had the opportunity to participate in a hands-on training week in Ostrava, Czech Republic, making new friends and getting introduced to a number of HPC technologies.
I am excited to continue my experience, spending two months during this summer in Denmark, working on accelerating climate kernels, a project hosted by Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. My task will be to improve performance of ocean numerical solvers in the Versatile Ocean Simulator (Veros) project by porting them to run on different accelerators, particularly GPGPUs and Xeon Phis. I am eager to not only enable more efficient climate simulations and gain more experience in supercomputing but also meet interesting people and discover the culture of the happiest country in the world.
I am an enthusiastic programmer and enjoy learning about new technologies, which is why I like participating in local hackathons – as they are a great opportunity to build small projects and expand your skills. I am also an avid supporter of free and open-source software. Apart from programming, I love traveling to foreign countries as well as exploring the numerous treasures of my homeland, Greece.
My friend Antti described me as
A cool guy
Here is me presenting in parallel with my friend Alessandro Marzo:
Hello there, my name is Adrián Rodríguez Bazaga and I’m a 21 years old guy from Valencia (the home of the Paella!), but I come from the beautiful island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Spain. This is where I just finished my Bachelor’s Degree in Informatics Engineering at the University of La Laguna. In September of this year I will be travelling to Barcelona to pursue my Master’s degree in Innovation and Research in Informatics with the specialization on Data Science and Machine Learning offered by UPC (Polytechnical University of Catalonia).
Me at the President Garden in Bratislava
Throughout my degree I learned many things about the world of technology, arousing my curiosity in certain fields of Computer Science. Specifically, I am very interested in Data Science (Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery), artificial intelligence (Machine Learning, heuristics), Bioinformatics (Genomics, etc.), parallel algorithms and High Performance Computing (HPC). To obtain conclusions from data sets that initially seemed to have no value is something that strikes me; including the part of data analysis, mathematical statistics and Deep Learning, since it provides a potential tool that can be used to make important decisions.
In 2016, I had the opportunity to work as a research intern at a renowned research institution, where I worked on a project in the field of Big Data: RDF processing solutions through Big Data for the discovery of relationships between concepts in the DBpedia. Also, from December 2016 until June 2017 I worked on a research project at a research group at the University of La Laguna, thanks to a grant by the Spanish Government. Specifically, the project was called ‘Exploiting Open Data sources through Data Mining, classification and regression techniques with Spark to analyze traffic flow’, where we propose the use of Data Science and Machine Learning techniques with Apache Spark. The use of techniques such as decision trees and multilayer perceptrons for the prediction of road traffic congestion level, focused on the road network that connects the container terminal of Tenerife’s port to the highway’s access. This is important to look at as it is the main traffic bottleneck when delivering products inside and outside of the port.
In June 2017, I finished my final degree project: ‘Heuristics and Big Data in mathematical optimization problem: extension to the Tourist Trip Design Problem’, where my objective was to solve a problem that by definition is NP-hard using an artificial intelligence approach. Specifically, approximate algorithms (heuristics) such as GRASP with LRC, among others were used. Furthermore, I had to work with data from different datasets and link them (Linked Data). All of them together were used to try to gather information about every point available on the Earth. So, we are talking about a volume of more than 100 million instances (the so-called Big Data concept).
My interests are still greater, I’m interested in learning, researching and developing tools that allows to improve medical applications using Data Science, which is my current interest: Bioinformatics. This interest was motivated, among other reasons, by my visit to the ITER Supercomputing Center, where the TEIDE HPC supercomputer is hosted (the second most powerful in Spain), and where IonGAP (an integrated genome assembly platform for Ion Torrent data) is used as part of a chain of tools to research on genomics, and Data Mining for medical diagnosis. Medical data mining has a great potential for exploring the hidden patterns in the data sets of the medical domain, which can be utilized for clinical diagnosis. Taking into account that available raw medical data are widely distributed, heterogeneous, and voluminous, my interests are to collect that data in an organized form to build medical information systems that can help to reduce the huge rate of deaths that can be prevented if a diagnosis can be made in time. To make this possible, we need to use a High Performance Computing (HPC) approach, which mostly refers to the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve large problems in science, engineering, or business.
During this summer, thanks to the PRACE Summer of HPC programme, I will be working at the Computing Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, on the project “Apache Spark: Are Big Data tools applicable in HPC?” where my objective is the implementation and optimization of the routinely used quantum chemistry Hartree-Fock method in Scala with Spark and in C++ with MPI to perform some benchmarking. Other quantum chemistry algorithms such as Density Function Theory and Second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation will be also looked into, so I’ll need to deal with the quantum many-body theory, trying to bridge HPC with the Big Data world, and resulting in visually appealing outputs such as molecules, orbitals, among others.
Greetings from the far north! My name is Antti and I like all sorts of things mathematical. There’s just something very savoury about a well-structured, intuitive and dumbfounding mathematical proof. Basically, I like to look for problems and solve them. I especially like it when something is incomprehensible; that thing is then a mystery waiting to be unraveled!
Mathematics is all very fascinating, but sometimes you also need to do some calculating. That’s hard work and I’m quite lazy. So most of the time I let the computer to do that stuff. Programming computers is difficult and time-consuming, especially if one doesn’t have the know-how. That’s why I decided to participate in the PRACE Summer of HPC program, where 21 students from around Europe will learn about data visualization and high-performance computing from the top experts. My home institute, University of Eastern Finland, in which I study applied physics, was more than happy to send me off to this prestigious international summer study program.
Here’s me on top of an old steel mill. It’s perfectly safe, you see: I have a helmet. Click on the image to go to a blog post about Ostrava, written by my friend, Dimitra.
The first week of this program went whizzing by in Ostrava, Czech Republic, where all of us learned about parallel programming using all sorts of compute clusters, vectorzation in modern processor chips and data visualization using ParaView software. Days were spent on lectures and hands-on exercises and nights were spent enjoying each other’s company in local restaurants. Without a doubt, I can say that the last week was the most fun I’ve had for a long time! It also turned out that I’m a pretty good dancer, at least on the tables of an Irish pub.
The next seven weeks I’m spending in Jülich, Germany at Jülich Research Center. It was originally the nuclear research center of West Germany, but gradually the nuclear physics research diminished while the presence of other disciplines grew. Nowadays, it is one of the biggest research centers in Europe carrying out top research in many different fields. My project concerns programming GPUs to compute Coulombic forces, i.e. the attractive and repulsive electric forces between charged particles, and to carry out these computations blazingly fast using the Fast Multipole Method. It roughly is an approach to solve the problem by clustering the particles into larger cells and computing forces between them. To make the code more accessible for more users and devices, I utilize an open source framework called Heterogenous-Compute Interface for Portability, or HIP. The framework enables programming for multiple types of GPUs simultaneously. I still don’t know the specifics of my project, but you’re are able to read the extent of it from here.
Lastly, since this is an introductory post, to get to know me even better, the following is a small subset of my favourite things:
Favourite class of a linear partial differential equation: Elliptic equations
Favourite numerical approach in problem solving and simulation: Monte Carlo method
Hi everyone! I am Shukai Wang, a Chinese girl from a very very very beautiful city, called Hangzhou (you should visit!), I have spent my past 7 years in the UK but I am now following the two-month PRACE Summer of HPC program in the Czech Republic. I have completed my undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Imperial College London with a placement year at the Schlumberger Gould Research Centre at Cambridge. My project was to develop the hydraulic fracturing fluids which are the fluids pumped into the ground to produce shale gas. During the placement, I realised the importance of inter-disciplinary research skills, thus I decided to pursue my PhD in the simulation of HIV proteins (Vpu) in membranes using Molecular Dynamics simulations, at the same institution. This is where my HPC journey began.
Thanks to the full support of the PRACE Summer of HPC program for my visa and travel arrangements, I will join the IT4Innovations Centre, the best High Performance Computing centre in the Czech Republic. The campus is nice, big and quiet, with a big forest just 3 min walk away from the hotel. My project is Performance Visualization for Bioinformatics Pipelines. The idea is to process the visualisation of results from performance analysis of machine learning and to understand the bioactivity trends of the molecules. I hope I could become a Python master after my project, particularly in data visualisation and machine learning.
During my spare time, I enjoy travelling. I have been to 17 countries, experienced the fascinating northern lights in the north pole, the extraordinary milky way in the Sahara Desert, helped people in Bosnia to rebuild their home after the war and volunteered in the once-in-a-life-time London Olympics 2012. I am also interested in business and believe that a combination of business and technology will lead our future. I have completed five real consulting projects with the society at Imperial College and participated in the Accenture Hackthon competition, being nominated for the award of rising star. I am also a big fan of swimming and painting.
My name is David Bourke, and I am a Computer Engineering student studying for my integrated Masters degree in Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Before coming to TCD, I completed a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). I became interested in High Performance Computing while developing a lattice model protein folding simulation as a student at DIT. This protein folding simulation was deployed to the Fionn supercomputer, which is owned by the Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC).
Last summer, I worked with a security startup and developed software for digital camera source identification and fingerprinting based on Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU). I have experience with Python, Golang, C, C++, CUDA, Matlab, BASH and Julia. I have also worked with ARMv7, x86 / x86_64, MC6800, and MC6809 assembly. I have worked with VHDL and Verilog, and believe that FPGAs will be increasingly utilized in High Performance Computing as it becomes more difficult to develop faster processors due to the end of Moore’s law.
When I am not debugging code, I enjoy rock climbing, hiking and fencing, with saber being my preferred weapon. Aside from sports I also plays the guitar and enjoy live music.
I will be working on the project, “Visualization of real motion of human body based on motion capture technology“. This project will involve generating a 3D model of a human skeleton based on images captured from computed tomography scanning, and creating a visualization of motion using motion capture technology and inverse kinematics. The visualization will be developed using Blender and Unity3D. I chose this project because I am interested in computer vision, image processing and visualization. Particularly, I am interested in learning about biomedical image processing. I am enjoying my stay in the Czech Republic so far, and look forward to learning more about the country as I stay here.
Hello everyone! My name is Arnau Miró. I am a 27 year old PhD student from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. I am currently located in a very nice city in Spain called Terrassa, which is about 30 km away from Barcelona. Do you want to know more about me? Keep reading and watch my short introduction video!
I am currently working in the interesting world of Aerodynamics and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) as part of my PhD program. The thing about CFD is that the more complex the problem is, the more computational power is needed to solve it. This is how I got introduced in the world of High Performance Computing. Currently, I am also a collaborator in the Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
This summer, I will be staying in this beautiful city, Bologna, working on the project “Web visualization of the Mediterranean Sea” supervised by Dr. Paolo Lazzari in the OGS – National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics. I believe it will be a great opportunity for me to further dive into the world of HPC as well as enhance my knowledge about visualization, which is crucial for today’s researchers. I also expect to spend a great amount of time this summer visiting Bologna and the beautiful cities nearby as well as tasting the excellent Italian cuisine.
What else can I say about me? When I’m not programming or putting CFD simulations on the supercomputer, you can find me watching series, cooking or grabbing a beer with my friends. If you still cannot find me, it is because I am probably lost in the mountains, doing one of my favorite hobbies: landscape astrophotograpy or taking nice pictures of the stars, like the one below.
The Milky Way and the Dark Horse Nebula behind the oak tree.
I’m really excited about the opportunity that the PRACE Summer of HPC program offers. It’s always nice to meet different people from different backgrounds and cultures.
Ahoj! My name is Petr and I come from a magical land of beer – Czech Republic. I live and study in Brno, the second largest city, sometimes called the Silicon Valley of central Europe.
Last spring I finished my bachelor’s degree at Brno University of Technology (BUT), Faculty of Information Technology and I continue to study there for a Master’s degree in the Information Technology Security program.
Since my earliest days in IT, I have been interested in data visualisation. During recent years this has been one of the main issues in big data (which is my point of interest as well). This is why my bachelor thesis topic was in a similar field—”Visualization of Network Security Events” which focused on visualising large datasets of network events.
With big data comes the need for high-performance computing and that is how I got interested in the PRACE Summer of HPC program, where a couple of projects were right in my field of interest. I was lucky enough to be chosen for such a project and during the summer I will develop a web visualization of HPC system’s energy load with guys from the CINECA facility in Bologna, Italy. With this project in mind we are going the other way around because the HPC system itself will generate really big data (e.g. monitoring or statistics information) and the tricky thing here is to pick the correct data to collect, analyze, store and eventually visualize.
Every now and then I try to pickup a new skill (in IT, of course) and most recently I dived into IoT (Internet of things). How? Simple, I bought Raspberry Pi Zero W and a couple of sensors to tinker with. Now I know the temperature of my flat when I am away. It might sound silly but the next project I will undertake is to build a quadrocopter from scratch controlled by a Steam Controller. Cool, huh?
That’s what you call “stack overflow”
When I power off my PC (which I usually don’t anyway) I enjoy a good book or movie. One of my most favorite writers is Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy book series. Another passion in my life is food. I love to cook and I love to eat it. That is another reason I am really looking forward to be in Bologna. Bye bye, diet!
To finish off with my favorite quote (with a small addition):
During this summer, thanks to the PRACE Summer of HPC programme, I will be working at the Computing Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, on the project “
