Sean Mahon

Hi. My name is Sean, I’m 22 years old and I’m currently in Bologna for the training week of the Summer of HPC programme run by PRACE. I’ve just finished my undergraduate degree in Theoretical Physics at Trinity College Dublin. About a week after this programme is over, I will be starting my masters in Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh.

I got my first experience in High Performance Computing during my final year project and thought Summer of HPC would be a great opportunity to learn more about this exciting area. One thing I’ve realised from the training week is that, even if it’s just a parallel “Hello World” programme to make sure everything works, the novelty of running jobs on a supercomputer that’s too big to fit in one room won’t wear off for a long time.

My main hobby for a number of years has been playing hurling, an Irish sport which would probably take multiple blog posts to explain in any sort of detail. I am also interested in music and often play the guitar to wind down when things get a bit busy. Other than that, I spend a large proportion of my spare time drinking coffee. It’s started to get worryingly expensive, but at least it means I can stay awake long enough to write this.

Once the training week is over, I’ll be going to Luxembourg for the rest of the summer. I will spend the next seven weeks working on performance analysis tools for some well-known deep learning frameworks on HPC systems. I’m really looking forward to working on an interesting project in a country that you don’t get many opportunities to visit.