My journey in SoHPC: An introduction

Greetings everyone. My name is Ioannis Savvidis and I come from a beautiful city named Kavala in Greece where I am writing this post. I am a Materials Science and Engineering undergraduate student at University of Ioannina with an interest in computational materials science. Growing up I had an interest in programming and its applications and I enjoyed a lot playing video games on computer with friends. For my studies I didn’t choose a related degree to follow because I had a bigger interest in chemistry, physics and engineering. That lead me to MSE department, were in my last year I chose to follow the path of computational materials science. Even though this is not a “mainstream” pathway for my department, I decided to follow it, because I see a big opportunity in advancement of new material discovery and applications.

Other interests that I have are related to sports and cooking. Before the pandemic of COVID19, I used to workout a lot by going to a gym and train on Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a ground based martial art that is focused on grappling and leverages that will lead to submissions. Other sports that I enjoy doing are snowboard in winter and sailing in summer. After the pandemic, we had to stay in home so most of my free time I would use it on cooking and watching TV series like Peaky Blinders or Better call Saul, two of the best series I have ever watched to tell the truth.

In those times a teacher associated on computational materials science suggested to me to look for SoHPC and if I am interested to any project to apply for internship. That was the first time I learned about HPC and its applications and I was intrigued and wanted to participate and learn more.

When I got the email of acceptance I was very happy that I got the opportunity to work on a supercomputer and learn a lot of new things. And so after the first training week that I found it very informative, I learned about applications on supercomputers and parallel programming. So for this summer I will be working as a team with Eduard Zsurka for Project 2108:Efficient Fock matrix construction in localized Hartree-Fock method under the guidance of Dr. Jan Simunek.