Christopher Kirwan

About Me

Greeting from Westmeath, Ireland, I’m Christopher Kirwan. I am 23 years old and last year graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a bachelors degree in Theoretical Physics. For as long as I could remember, I always had a passion for STEM and how the world works fundamentally. While completing my degree, I also gained an admiration for the intersection of computing and physics. Naturally, an interest in High Performance Computing (HPC) arose from those passions.

Why This Project?

Recently, I was given the wonderful news that I would be starting a PhD in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (Lattice QCD for short) with Trinity College Dublin, funded by IBM Research Dublin. I will be researching modern techniques, algorithmic advances and workflow optimizations in Lattice QCD in the exascale. This research is intimately tied to advances in HPC, so to get a good grounding in HPC infrastructure I applied to the PRACE Summer of HPC programme.

I was absolutely delighted when I got my first choice: High Performance Quantum Fields. It’s not often you get handed a project that aligns exactly with your research area! This project is organised/hosted by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and I hope to gain some excellent computing experience from them over the summer.

Initial Experience

So the first week is over – the dreaded training week. Unfortunately, along with the project, this was held remotely. As I am based in Ireland, this meant a series of early mornings to make it into the office for the 8AM start. Aside from that, the training sessions were incredibly fun and very interesting. I also had the opportunity to meet with my fellow colleague on this project Apostolos Giannousas.