SoHPC Orientation Week: a reflection
Buon giorno! I am currently sitting on a plane headed for Amsterdam where I will begin my HPC project, and I thought I would take this opportunity to compose my next blog update.
We have officially finished our orientation week in Bologna! This past week was full of so much learning. With classes from 9 to 6, Monday to Friday, we managed to cover a lot of content: principles of HPC, Parallel Processing, OpenMP, MPI syntax in C (note: I am not a C programmer), CUDA, remote visualization with Paraview, Blender, CINECA’s Galileo and Marconi clusters, and more…
All of the above were essentially foreign to me before this week. The SoHPC coordinators have taken great effort to ease even the least computer science-y of us into the realm of HPC in an engaging way.
My favorite part of this past week has been getting to know my fellow interns. We have since dispersed to different corners of Europe: eleven HPC sites across eleven different European countries host the students for the remaining of the summer, where we are each allocated to our own unique project. But for this first week, we all had the opportunity to get to know one other, help each other out with classwork, enjoy the Italian heat, and bond over (too much) pizza, pasta and gelato!
If this first week was any indication of what’s to come, I’m up for a fantastic Summer of HPC!
Stay tuned for my next update, coming at you from Amsterdam 🙂
Hi all! I'm Allison, and I have the great pleasure of being one of the participants in the 2019 Summer of HPC Program. I am Canadian born, Australian raised, and I have just finished studying in Spain. My professional background is in analytics and research, and my recently completed Masters in Big Data Solutions led me to the PRACE summer program. Following this exciting orientation week in Bologna, I will be heading to Amsterdam. There, I will spend eight weeks working on a Data Architecture project with the e-Ecology team at SURFsara. The goal is to improve how ornithologists query and analyse bird migration radar data. My expertise is more in analytics and Data Science (rather than Data Engineering), so this summer is going to be an exciting new challenge! I can't wait to begin :)
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