Li Juan Chan

Introduction :: Who am I?
Hello World, I am Li Juan Chan. I am currently a fourth year mechanical engineering student from the University of Manchester. You might be wondering how a mechanical engineering student ended up in a HPC research programme. The reason is simple. I do not want to be a typical mechanical engineer!!! I want to develop strong programming skills so that I can run some cool engineering simulations. Have you seen the cool, colourful airflow animation around an airplane? Yes, that is one of the application that mechanical engineers do with supercomputer. In fact, my project in Bologna is similar to this with the title of “In Situ/Web Visualisation of CFD Data using OpenFOAM”. There will be no airplane but I promise you it will be colourful.

My experience in Bologna
As soon as I landed on Bologna, the airline that I took sent me a message telling me that my luggage will not arrive. What an unfortunate beginning of this exciting program. The second surprise was a staff working in the Bologna Airport drives a Lamborghini around the airbase!!! The third surprise was PRACE was so generous to rent us such an amazing hotel.
On the first day, I met a lot of participants of this program. I also found out that most of them have strong programming background. I was nervous at first as I did not want to fall behind. As you know my background is mechanical engineering and so I do not have a lot of programming experience. However, I guess this makes it a good reason why I should work harder than most of them. In the first week of training, I learned MPI and OpenMP which I have to admit they are hard for me. However, I am still confident that I will master them if I do not give up.

Preview of Next Chapter
Before I know, the training is almost finished. Next week, I will be moving into a beautiful house in the city centre of Bologna. Furthermore, I will also start working on my project (in the progress of producing colourful animation). Want to know more about the house and the project? Stay tuned!!!