Marcin Konieczny

Hello everyone,

I am a 21 years old student at Poznań University of Technology in the field of Computer Science. In September I’m going to start my last semester of my BSc degree. In a nutshell, I’m a geography and floorball lover, never too tired of trying something new (isn’t life all about trying new things?).

Me and George during the bus tour around the Edinbourgh.

My programming journey started in the last year of high school. In the beginning I claimed that programming is boring, but then I saw some people writing code for calculation purposes. I must say that I got interested. Underestimating programming was a mistake, but also a valuable lesson. I learned how to discover things deeper. That was a turning point which changed my life plans.

During my studies, I try to be active in many fields. My main programming language is Python. I am also familiar with frameworks like Django for Python and jQuery for JavaScript. The big challenge for me is my Bachelor thesis. The aim of it is to classify some artifacts on crystallography photos using machine learning tools. It introduced me to concepts of neural networks, decision trees, regression algorithms and in general statistics.

I am a participant of machine-learning circle GHOST( check it out ! http://ghost.put.poznan.pl/en/ ). When our tutor Mateusz Lango showed me the HPC site I was very excited. I imagined how effective it would be to work with such huge computing power. I was inspired by supercomputers and that’s why I am a part of the PRACE Summer of HPC programme right now.

In the training week in Edinbourgh, day by day I gained more experience in C++ and MPI. Despite beeing familiar with MPI, I found out and learnt some really interesting information.

In the capital of Scotland was the place where I met people from many faculties. It was very inspirational to observe physicists, mechanical engineers and computer scientists developing their code. Moreover, I had a chance to experience many foreign habits like the ‘irresistible need of keeping sunglasses with you wherever you are’ (thank you George). I couldn’t believe that someday I will use to word ‘lunch’ ( in Poland in general we don’t use it), but now it’s in my blood. My family tried to help me gain weight from many years, but what they really should do is send me to Edinburgh to have some lunches. It helped. Really.

It took me a bit to get used to left-hand traffic in UK.

All good things must come to the end. From Edinbourgh I flew to Ljubljana where I started a new adventure with HPC. You won’t belive how beautifull this city is…

At the Univeristy of Ljubljana I am working on data about radiation levels in the world using Hadoop and R programming language. Hadoop is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming models. Hadoop works with assistance of the MapReduce algorithm. It allows me to get the most important information from big data (i.e txt files of size 20 Gb).

I am really glad that I have a chance to meet the world of HPC!!! Who knows, maybe one day you will be able to say the same words !