Julen Expósito

Hello everyone! I’m Julen Expósito, I’m 24 years old and I live in San Cristobal de La Laguna, Spain. I graduated in Physics at the Public University of the Basque Country and I am currently finishing a Master in Astrophysics at the University of La Laguna, place where I discovered my passion for research and my taste for theoretical and computational work with physical models.

I have learned a lot in the master, but I have never had a real opportunity to work in collaborative projects of a certain size or with supercomputers. In my second year I learned how to program in parallel and through my contact with researchers I got a good idea of how they used to work in the field of high performance computing. As someone looking to work with simulations and big data in astrophysics in the future, I knew that I could really use some experience working with supercomputers on a real project, beyond the didactic testing ground of a master’s degree, so when one of my professors told me about Summer of HPC I was very interested, as it offered me just what I wanted before starting a PhD.

In my project I will perform High Performance Data Analysis with the results of a multi-scale simulations of plasma code. This code is being used by my mentors to simulate the interaction between the solar wind and planetary magnetospheres, and I can assure you for which I have explored of it so far that my interest in acquiring experience with large collaboratory codes is going to be fulfilled, in addition to deepening my knowledge of parallel computing. My job will be to work with and optimize the post-processing of the simulation outputs, so I hope to be up to the task and do a good job!

There is one other thing that I think this program is going to bring me. Something that is easy to consider secondary, but which is extremely important in the life of a researcher. You see, I had never left my country, nor had I ever had to speak with other people in a language other than Spanish. For this project I have had to move to Nice, France, and that has brought me to a new environment in which I have to force myself to speak English with everyone (and many times to communicate with people in the city who only speak French, a language that I do not know at all!). I find myself very much out of my comfort zone, and I admit that these first few days were very scary. I think that, for the moment, I’ve managed to get by and quickly get used to this new place. A research scientist has to get used to moving from place to place and cooperating with people from all over the world, and I am very grateful for this opportunity to gain that experience and get rid of the fear of leaving the comfortable walls within which I have always moved.

Let’s see what this experience brings me, and what I can bring to the project I will be immersed in these next few weeks. It’s time to use everything I’ve learned over the years to contribute to science!