Falling in love with HPC

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

– Steve Jobs

Hello, I am Aneta, 24 years old, and currently I am an undergraduate computer science student at the Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica. I decided to take a course in computer science three years ago. Before that, I was mostly focused on humanities, but I figured out that I am bad at memorizing and I wanted some change in my life. This decision, so far is one of the best that I have ever made. Even though, I am still not sure in what field of computer science I want to pursue a career, but I know that I am on the right path.

During my studies there were a few subjects where High Performance Computing (HPC) was discussed and I was introduced to parallel programming. I must state, that I enjoyed all of these subjects, so when one of my university teachers brought up Summer of HPC, it immediately piqued my interest. For those who are not familiar with the concept of HPC, it “refers to computing systems with extremely high computational power that are able to solve hugely complex and demanding problems”, as stated on European Commission’s webpage.

In May I found out that I was accepted by the committee of Summer of HPC and I felt great! I was selected for project number 2101, which is about the analysis of data management policies in HPC architectures. In charge of this project is the Barcelona Supercomputing Center which, needless to say, is located in Barcelona (Spain). This project is part of the MEEP project, which’s objective is to create an emulation software development platform for exascale systems. To put it simply, my job is going to be to analyze and compare ways of data movement, storage and access through the different levels of memory hierarchy in order to achieve high performance and efficiency.

Over the next two months, I hope to learn about how teams work on large projects, to gain new skills that I may put to use in the future and maybe to find some new friends.

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