Summer of HPC and Martin Stodůlka

Introduction

Hello, my name is Martin Stodůlka and I will use this blog post as a way to introduce myself. I am 25 years old and I was born and still live in town called Brno located in Czech Republic. I have earned my Master’s degree (Ing. title in my country) this year with specialization in HPC. I’ve graduated from both Bachelors and Masters on Brno University of Technology – Faculty of Information Technology.

Even prior to university I attended a grammar school Vídeňská which specialized in programming where I had my first experiences with programming. Outside of school ever since I was 18 years old I worked part time during summer holidays in a company Tescan which specializes in manufacturing and developing electron microscopes and the software that operates said microscopes. I mostly developed tools for processing large data and worked on some image processing methods as well.

Outside of programming I am just an average guy who likes: tourism, sight seeing, PC building and gaming. I used to go fishing and collect minerals when I was younger. As of late I have been thinking about getting into airsoft to get some more physical exercise and keep in touch with my childhood friends.

Why have I chosen SoHPC and what do I expect from it?

I have chosen Summer of HPC to test and expand my skills learned at my university. I am also hoping to explore new environment, people and perhaps opportunities. I have learned about Summer of HPC during one of lectures about HPC, where previous absolvents shared their experiences with Summer of HPC.

The project I am working on

I have been assigned to a project called Designing Scientific Applications on GPUs with my colleague Theodoros and my mentor for this project is Dr. Ezhilmathi Krishnasamy. For the rest of the summer I will be working on optimizing application for large scale topology optimization called TopOpt which uses library PETSc which is used for highly parallel scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations. My goal is to locate slow parts of code in TopOpt and speed them up using CUDA/GPUs and replace CPU PETSc code with GPU variant.