Hello World! This is me, Dominik Freinberger.
This is me staring at a blank sheet of paper.
Hard facts
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;
class Participant {
public:
int age;
string first_name, secnd_name;
string city, country;
};
int main() {
// create me
Participant me;
// set attributes
me.age = 24;
me.first_name = "Dominik";
me.secnd_name = "Freinberger";
me.city = "Vienna";
me.country = "Austria";
return 0;
}About me
Now that you know the hard facts, let me tell you a little bit more about me. I consider myself a curious individual who has always been interested in how things work and how to utilize them. This fascination eventually led me to complete a bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Vienna, during which I focused on computational methods and coding early on. Overall, I’ve been interested in computers for as long as I can remember, from small single-board computers to large high-performance clusters. Luckily, I was able to find my sweet spot between mathematics, natural sciences, engineering and computer science in my master’s program computational science and engineering at the Vienna Universtiy of Technology (TU Wien).
Besides HPC, I am very interested in machine learning, quantum computing, and nuclear fusion. In these topics I educate myself in my spare time as well as in extracurricular courses. In particular, in the field of machine learning, I was able to deepen my knowledge during my participation in a research project on the prediction of electronic charge localization using only structural information. Along the way, this has also sparked my interest in modeling and simulating the world at the quantum level.
So much for my academic career. When it’s not about university or studying, I enjoy leisurely strolling through Vienna or reading a good book. I also like to go to Lower Austria to my home village and go hiking in the rolling hills, alone or with friends. Together with my brother and a friend I also like to shoot photos and make videos or design websites.
A city awakens: morning mood before sunrise in Vienna.
Motivation for SoHPC
As already said, I’m excited about the intersection of science, engineering, math, and computer science. I am particularly fascinated by the possibility of being able to solve problems from a wide variety of fields using, in many cases, similar algorithms and tools. The summer of HPC program gives me the opportunity to live out these interests hands-on on real world problems. It is the first time I will be working with a supercomputer, so I am even more excited to learn more about the HPC workflow. I also enjoy the international exchange and working with new people on exciting topics.
The specific topic I will be working on is this one. I will investigate how radiation and other influences from a burning plasma in a fusion reactor affect certain properties of tungsten. For this I will perform molecular dynamics simulations on the Mare Nostrum supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. If you read this post carefully, you will realize that this project combines many of my interests: quantum-level simulations on a large-scale supercomputer with the goal of getting one step closer to controlled nuclear fusion. Can it get any better?
Hey, thats a quite interesting topic you work on. Can you maybe tell me why you chose tungsten and if you maybe already expecting a certain result of this simulation?
Hi Martin,
thank you for reading the post and reacting to it!
The reason I will be studying tungsten is because tungsten has the highest melting point of all the elements and also has a high thermal conductivity. Both are essential properties for a material to be used in a fusion reactor where very large absolute amounts of heat but also large thermal gradients (large temperature differences over short distances) occur.
Regarding expected observations, I cannot make any statements of my own for the time being, since at this point it is not yet certain which quantities I will specifically investigate. However, I like to refer here to a project from the year 2021, where it was shown that the mentioned thermal conductivity of tungsten is strongly affected by defects and impurities: Thermal conductivity of a crystal for dummies
I hope this could answer your questions.
Best, Dominik