Summer Fun in Corona Time

Hi everybody! My name is Josip Bobinac and I am 24 years old. Just before the start of the Summer of HPC, I finished my second semester of Master’s program in Computational Science and Engineering at Vienna University of Technology.

When I am outside of the scientific computing domain, I enjoy sports like volleyball, running, swimming and have recently taken up yoga and playing Ukulele. As a big fan of healthy eating, you can find me feeding my pet Liza every morning – she is a Kefir-producing mushroom. If you are interested in the wonderful milk bacteria, I can give you an introduction to the art of kefir. Additionally, I enjoy meeting people of different cultures and nationalities, and of course – travelling.

Motivation

My frequent encounters with texts and videos from highly motivated and inspired people often leave me craving for clarity about what I want to do professionally. As the Master’s program sparked my interest for efficient simulations, I decided to make an additional step in that direction and immerse myself in the world of High Performance Computing. I believed and still believe I will gain some of that clarity through additional commited work. Hence, when one of my colleagues told me about Summer of HPC earlier this year, I applied immediately.

It is now early July and the months following that decision were quite unusual. Although not exactly as imagined, I have a great pleasure to be working on the project “Got your ducks in a row? GPU performance will show” in Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany. However, I will be working on it from my humble “home-office” in Vienna that you can see in the picture below.

This is also the place where I participated in the training week organized by Vienna Scientific Cluster. Although the circumstances were not ideal, meeting my SoHPC peers through video conference and going over the introductions to blogging, MPI, OpenMP and CUDA programming made the whole experience worthy already. Below you can see a picture from a stroll around the city that helped me process the new information right after the training week.

Stay tuned for my further posts about the project development!