Collaborating with the CompBioMed Centre of Excellence!

Hello everyone and welcome to my last blog post of this Summer of HPC 2020. As I told you on my previous post, these last weeks of the summer I’ve been working on analyzing the performance of Alya.

Alya is part of the CompBioMed (European Centre of Excellence), and it is developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). They were very interested in understanding how a new feature of their program behaves on Cartesius, so we collaborated with them to obtain meaningful metrics from the execution of Alya.

I especially enjoyed this part of my internship because in this case, I was helping not only HPC maintainers and users but also the developers to understand better how to improve their code.

Moreover, I was able to apply the methodology proposed by the POP Center of Excellence to analyse the performance of Alya. Particularly, we used the profiling tool MAQAO recommended by the POP CoE, and I helped to integrate its usage in the SURFsara workflow by creating a comprehensive guide on how to use it to follow the POP performance assessment methodology.

If you want to know more about what I and my mate Elman have been doing, take a look at the following video that we prepared!

The end of SoHPC 2020

Everything comes to an end, and unfortunately, Summer of HPC 2020 is near to finish. It has been a very enriching experience which I have enjoyed even more than expected. During this summer, I have learnt a lot of things. Not only regarding HPC (which is what one would expect) but also concerning remote working with people from different countries, which I find even more important than HPC concepts.
This new way of working was a challenge at first, but thanks to it, now I feel much more prepared to collaborate with teammates in this kind of environment.

Finally, I would like to thank PRACE and Summer of HPC organizers for giving us the opportunity of working on real HPC systems with top-level professionals and in an international environment. And of course, I want to thank my mentors of SURFsara for always being willing to help me with everything I needed and make the internship run smoothly.

This is all about my participation in the Summer of HPC 2020 program. I hope that you enjoyed reading about my progress in the world of HPC!