Igor Kunjavskij

Hi everyone, I’m Igor and am quite thrilled to be participating in this years Summer of HPC program organized by PRACE! Currently I am in the last term of my master studies in the field of Engineering Cybernetics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. After initially specializing during my bachelor studies in robotics and control engineering, I slowly started to deviate towards the field of Artificial Intelligence during my master studies. There I “inevitably” ran into the field of High Performance Computing (HPC), as it’s impossible to say Deep Learning without asking for computing resources in the same sentence. This led me to spending most of my free time during my master studies at the High Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart, which is conveniently located just next to my University. Here I was introduced into the exiting world of HPC and all of its intricacies. Here I also heard for the first time about this program and was immediately hooked by the idea to participate in it. One year and an application procedure later I am now happy to be one of the selected participants of this year’s Summer of HPC program!

Now during the first week of the program hosted by CINECA, the High Performance Computing Center located in Bologna, I got a little refresher on most of the important topics in HPC. These ranged from parallel computing with MPI and OpenMP to using CUDA in case a Nvidia GPU is available. We also had a crash course on how to how to visualize our results and to reach out with these on social media.

Our hosts at CINECA gave us a tour of the Supercomputer, providing us with interesting insights and the chance to look into the “heart” of a High Performance Computing Center. Next to that we managed to get a lot of impressions of the culture in Bologna and had a short tour of the city center.

After this week I will be heading up north towards Ireland to stay and work in Dublin on my project at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC). Here I will delve into the topic of Deep Learning on the edge, so stay tuned for more!