David Izquierdo

Hi all! My name is David Izquierdo and I am 21 years old. I am from Sabiñánigo, a little town in the north of Spain, and I will be soon finishing my bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering in the University Carlos III of Madrid.

Since I was a kid, I really enjoyed watching Formula One races. As time went by, I became more and more interested in motorsports and decided to pursue a career in F1 by studying Aerospace Engineering. To be honest, at the moment in which I made that decision I was not even close to aware of how things would evolve.

During my university studies, I discovered that engineering was indeed the field to which I would like to professionally dedicate my life. In particular, the courses that I took in Fluid Mechanics and Aerodynamics made it clear to me that understanding the behaviour of fluids and looking for new, better ways of solving the Navier-Stokes equations (the equations that describe a viscous fluid’s motion) were some of the challenges that more appealed to me, without forgetting that my final aim is always to apply the knowledge I acquire to the design of race cars -that is why I got involved in the Formula Student team of my university, Formula UC3M-.

HPC (High Performance Computing) became important in my life since, in order to look for better solutions to those equations that I was mentioning above, it is important to have access to a significant amount of computational power and to understand the basics of how a computer runs. When one of the professors of the CFD Research Group in the Carlos III university told me about the PRACE Summer of HPC programme (¡gracias Manolo!), I immediately went to the website to check the proposed projects, and then found out that one of them was about the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) study of a Formula Student car. It was just tailored for me; the perfect opportunity to connect the two fields that I like the most and to develop a project about it.

Luckily for me, I was accepted for the project, so I will be spending the next two months working on it in the IT4Innovations supercomputing centre in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Throughout this period, I will make the best of my efforts not only to develop the project itself, but to explain in this blog things like why aerodynamics is so important in our daily life, or how this project in particular, and HPC in general, can help to transform our society. I will try to make it understandable for all the people, well-versed or not in engineering or science topics.

Finally, I would like to say that, less than one week after the beginning of the PRACE Summer of HPC and even before having started the project, the experience has already been worthy, thanks to all the wonderful people that I have met during these first days. Good luck to everyone with your projects!