Online? On-site!

From left to right: My supervisor Mary Kate, me and my girlfriend Eva Maria.

Actually, I thought the last blogpost would be my last, but after a fortunate encounter in September, I have to publish this short post.

Eventually, we met in person.

After having spent two months with intense running of simulations and learning a lot about HPC and molecular dynamics I rewarded myself with a train journey through the south of Spain. Starting in Seville and proceeding to Cordoba and then Granada and after a one day visit to Saragossa I finally made it to Barcelona.

Barcelona was the place where my project took place during summer, although fully remote, due to the still present pandemic. So even tough I had a very engaging exchange with my supervisors during the summer, I never had the chance to meet them in real life, shake their hands or chat face to face. However, I made up for this in September, almost a month after SoHPC 2022 officially ended and got to visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the MareNostrum 4 supercomputer in a former church as well as it’s successor, the in-progress MareNostrum 5 supercomputer in the basement of the new office building of BSC.

I was warmly welcomed by Mary Kate and Julio, my former mentors, in the lobby of the BSC office building. We had a lively conversation at the balcony and then Mary Kate and Julio gave me a personal tour of the BSC site and, of course, the MareNostrum supercomputers. And as if that wasn’t all, I was able to meet the rest of the Fusion Group members at a delicious lunch to which Mervi Mantsinen, the head of the Fusion Group, invited us.

Down below you see the currently operating supercomputer MareNostrum 4, which I used to run my jobs, built into a church. A very surreal scene.