Philippos Papaphilippou

Me near the JUQUEEN supercomputer

Welcome to the PRACE Summer of HPC website! My name is Philippos and I am one of the current participants. I have done my Bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Cyprus and my Master in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. My computing interests range from computer architecture and high-performance computing to machine learning. I also find other science subjects very interesting such as physics and mathematics. A fascinating fact about the Summer of HPC program is that the majority of the projects combine different disciplines and this is the main reason I decided to apply.

My home country is Cyprus. In Cyprus we have a supercomputer at the Cyprus Institute that I have used in multiple occasions. It is amazing to think of what can be achieved with parallelisation in such a relatively small supercomputer. For example, on a typical utilization of the supercomputer you can run a workload of around 10.000 CPU hours in about a day. This essentially means that you can run an experiment that takes over a year to calculate in a single-core computer in one day. As the problem size scales, as well as when we move to bigger supercomputers, we can achieve more previously-unfeasible tasks in a small amount of time.

In my free time I like to listen to classical music. Some of my favourite composers are Bach, Fauré, Brahms and Duruflé. My music theory knowledge is limited, but I find the mathematical aspects of some pieces very interesting. In addition, I used to play the violin as a hobby and it is amazing how many different sounds a single instrument can produce. Each violinist has a unique way of expressing a piece of music and the interpretation may be influenced from the player’s experiences, the wood with which the violin was made, the string selection etc. My question would be whether an artificial neural network could be trained to reproduce a specific player’s playing ability given only the music score for different pieces. It would be surely a complex application and a single conventional few-core computer would probably be insufficient for this amount of computing.

Computer science is a rapidly evolving field and doing related research can be very fascinating. I look forward to begin experimentation with my project at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.

Friends quote: “A Cypriot programmer that has enthusiasm about a variety of things such as mechanical watches and computers.”

You can find more of my interests and some publicly available software (including a 3D N-Body simulator and a twilight calculator) by checking out my personal website: ucy.philippos.info.