Hello, New World!

A new journey begins. What should I take with me? Normally I would start packing my luggage with underwear. One for each day and the extra one I still take with me even though I am 26. But how do journeys look like in times of Covid-19? In the age of remote exchanges, we travel digitally in an adventure of the mind. So all I need is a light baggage containing the desire to explore the vast lands of high-performance computing.

For a successful expedition, good preparation is key. Therefore, we were provided with our hosts from the Summer of HPC who prepared us for the upcoming challenges. We all met in Vienna for a week of training, organizing, and connecting with each other. Since I am currently concluding my master’s degree in chemistry at the Univerity of Vienna it was not too hard to imagine being in Vienna and meeting everyone. The training gave us fundamental tools that we may need and was providing a wide range of insights, starting with easy topics like parallelization of programs and going all the way to complex tasks like doing the eagle in a yoga session. Overall the training week was a pleasure since it was well organized and the lectures were entertaining with a lot of social activities in between.

After the training week, we were sent on the way to our port of call. In the case of Busenur, Sara, Berker, and me the destination is the Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC) in Dublin. After a short trip via google meet, we met with our supervisor Myles to plan the upcoming weeks. The atmosphere was welcoming and very supportive. After setting up, we now start with our project Quantum Genome Pattern Matching using Rigetti’s Forest API and our overall journey into the world of quantum computing, to a new world.