~$ man Federico Camerota

Hi there! My name is Federico and as you can probably guess from the title of this post I’m quite a nerd (not the kind that plays video games though)*. My studies and interest in computers led me to Summer of HPC (SoHPC), but let’s start from the beginning..

About me

I’m Argentinian, but I’ve been living for several years now in Trieste, Italy. At the local university I got a bachelor’s degree in statistics and during that period I got very interested in programming. This passion pushed me to choose the master in data science and scientific computing I’m currently enrolled in. And there is where I met for the first time HPC.

In the first year, we had an introductory course on the foundations of HPC that also included some lectures on parallel programming using MPI, OpenMP and CUDA. I really enjoyed working through the assignments we had and running experiments on the cluster available for us. So when I heard about SoHPC it seemed like a great opportunity to make some experience in the field.

Unfortunately this happened after the 2019 applications had already closed. So I put a sticky note on my bedroom’s wall to remember about it for the next year. One year and half later, here we are at the second week of the SoHPC 2020.

Training week & the project

Last week we went through the training week, four days of lectures about blogging and parallel programming paradigms. Unfortunately, this year everything is done online but despite the hot weather (see above picture) it has been a wonderful experience.

We had the opportunity to learn the basics of MPI, OpenMP and CUDA and experiment with it using some cluster nodes reserved for us. Of course it would have been nicer to meet in person with the participants. But the organization was great and managed to make the training days interactive and involving for everybody.

This week we had the kick-off meeting with the site mentors and the projects started. I’ve been accepted for project 24 (Marching Tetrahedrons on the GPU ), we’ll be working on the implementation of an isosurface extraction algorithm running on GPU architectures. There are some interesting videos that show visually how a closely related algorithm (Marching Cubes) works and its application in computer graphics.

For the moment that’s all. Stay tuned for following updates on this SoHPC adventure!