Paddy Cahalane

THE PAST

My name is Paddy Cahalane and I am a 22-year-old student from Dublin, Ireland. I have just completed my undergraduate degree in Astrophysics at Trinity College Dublin. As part of my undergrad, I did a 3-month research project in machine learning and I enjoyed it so much I decided to pursue this field further.

I heard about the Summer of HPC from a lecturer in a Computer Simulation module and I immediately knew I wanted to apply. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. Coming from a physics background I knew I would need to learn a large amount of technical skills for this project, but what better way to spend quarantine? I certainly can’t think of any!

THE PRESENT

I am currently based in my family home in the suburbs of Dublin. My Mam and Dad are also working from home so it’s a very comfortable environment. During the recent lockdown, I’ve been trying to keep myself occupied by learning new skills. I’ve been playing chess, practicing yoga, learning the saxophone, and running a lot in the parks and forests near my house.

But enough playtime; bring on the HPC!

THE FUTURE

After a very enjoyable training week learning all about blogging, MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA, I look forward to finally getting immersed in this program. My project is out of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and involves parallelizing plasma kinetic code with a task-based approach. I hope to gain useful knowledge for my Phd which I begin in September.

This post was just a short introduction to who I am but I’ll be back with regular updates with many more details on my project!