Sara Sandh and a Summer of HPC!

About me…

Hi everyone! My name is Sara Sandh, I’m 24 years old from Stockholm, Sweden. Since this introduction will be long enough as-is, I decided to present a coarse overview of my life and educational background in a timeline. This instantly became a more interesting read, didn’t it?

As you can see, I’m currently a student in Computational Science and Engineering at Vienna University of Technology in Austria, and have previously spent some years in France and Belgium. Although I spend most of my time studying, I can easily get lost in the kitchen for hours at a time. There’s nothing I find as therapeutic as experimenting with elaborate dishes or even cutting an onion! For the (few) remaining hours of the day, I like to spend time with friends and family, grab a drink, watch series, or go bouldering.

The road to where I am now was rarely as clear as it may seem when you look at my timeline. I have always been a curious person. Unfortunately, that means that I’ve always had a few too many areas of interest to easily make decisions on what to do, and where to go next. Lucky for me, I for once happen to know exactly where I’m about to go next: to Paris for a Summer of HPC!

…and what about SoHPC?

So why am I here? Well, towards the end of my Bachelor’s degree, I started picking up more and more software development projects. As much as I loved the puzzling and problem-solving of these projects, I realized that most projects had no real connection to the other engineering fields that sparked my interest in technology in the first place. I spent a large part of that year trying to decide whether I should continue down the software path, or try to go back to a more classical engineering field. Eventually, I found the perfect solution that allowed me to combine both interests and keep all doors open: Computational Science and HPC.

It’s my mixed interests in programming, engineering, and scientific applications that lead me to PRACE and Summer of HPC. In this internship, I’m looking to challenge myself with a very interesting project in a completely new field. Besides the technical skills and training, I hope to gain some insight into what a career in HPC may look like. Ideally, I would also like to prove to myself that it’s possible to apply my skills and knowledge to any new discipline – that even when I’m specializing in a topic, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m closing doors to other opportunities and fields!

So what will I actually do this summer? I will be hosted at CentraleSupélec in Paris to implement an advanced stability condition of a high-order Spectral Element Method (a special type of Finite Element Method) for an HPC wave propagation solver called SEM3D. What this means in detail, I will leave as a great cliffhanger for my future blog posts, so be sure to come back in a few weeks!