Marius Neumann

Hello world! I am Marius Neumann, a 22-year old physics student from Germany. Currently I’m studying for my Master’s degree at Bielefeld University, Germany. Bielefeld is located close to the border between North Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony (and despite certain conspiracies indeed does exist).

During my studies I haven’t managed to travel a lot yet, so I see my PRACE Summer of HPC opportunity as a chance to visit some parts of Europe – which in my case are Scotland and Cyprus, where I expect insight in a culture quite different from Germany, hot weather, little rain and much to learn.

While studying physics, I somehow got into the theoretical department by writing my Bachelor’s thesis in Lattice QCD and since these calculations tend to be quite computationally expensive, I got into high performance computing as well. I like to describe QCD with a quote from Goethes Dr. Faust as “what holds the world together at its innermost”, since it is the theory of the force which binds the quarks together to form protons and neutrons – and these make up the world as we know it.

I do not only see High Performance Computing as a way to hurry up my calculations, but also as the door to some new interesting fields such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, which may or probably will have an impact on our future. Thus, I consider HPC beyond physics as an important field to be trained in.

During the Summer of HPC program I will spend two months in Nicosia at the Cyprus Institute, where I will try to enable lattice QCD simulations on GPUs by optimizing solver performance on Piz Daint, the now sixth fastest supercomputer in the world.

When I´m not debugging code, I enjoy playing chess, grabbing a beer or sometimes even hiking around.

See you around Europe!