Neli Sedej

Welcome to my Summer of HPC blog! In this post I will tell a little about myself and about the very exciting start of the SoHPC program.

About me

My name is Neli and I am finishing my Master’s degree in chemistry at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before enrolling into university I had to decide: biochemistry or computer science? I chose the former, but later I found the way to combine both. I got acquainted with supercomputing during my Bachelor’s thesis. This convinced me that big computers are much more thrilling for me than a normal biochemistry laboratory. I continued in this field in my Master’s thesis and I intend to stick with it for PhD. Computational biochemistry is a more and more important dicsipline of biochemistry and can be used to tackle many problems inaccesible to the experimental methods. For now, I have considered myself more of a “user” of HPC, but I desire to learn more about how it works and how to write my own, efficient software. When I heard about the SoHPC it seemed like a perfect program for me! Naturally, I chose a project that is connected to chemistry: Neural networks in quantum chemistry at CCAS in Bratislava, Slovakia. I am glad that I was chosen for a project about neural networks, since they are a very powerful method, becoming more and more popular in chemistry. I have a great interest in Neural networks, but I have not had the chance to program my own. And here is my chance!

Besides science, I also love nature, hiking and climbing. When I can not be outside, I spend my time with learning languages and playing guitar.

Starting off

I will not lie, I was very excited about spending a week in Vienna for the training week and another seven weeks in Bratislava. Due to COVID-19 the whole program is organized online. I have to say I was positively surprised about how well the online training week turned out! We could learn a lot about supercomputers and parallel programming from the comfort of our homes and we still got to meet a lot of new people. Another great thing is that we get to work on project in teams. I might have to find another reason to learn Slovakian, but nevertheless, I am sure that this is going to be an exciting summer!