Time to begin Summer of HPC and (deep) learning!

Hello everyone! My Name is Jakub, I am 23 years old and at the moment I am pursuing a Master’s degree in artificial intelligence at Poznań University Of Technology (Poland). Earlier this year, I graduated with Bachelor’s degree in computer science at the same university.

Few words about me

Besides studying, I like to play competitive video games and solve different kind of puzzles, like Sudoku, Kakuro, Nonograms and all stuff similar to those, especially if it’s somehow related to math or numbers. I also like to go for walks and doing some casual sports like table tennis or volleyball (the only sport I train regularly though is running for trains and buses as I am constantly late for those). In last 18 months I also spent big chunk of my leisure time on analysing data and reading news about COVID-19.

To be honest, I was very lucky to get a chance to apply to Summer of HPC programme, as I was saved by extended application deadline as I was informed about the programme by my new university mentor with whom I work since April, who by the way was one of the participants in year 2016.

Why Summer of HPC?

I decided to apply to Summer of HPC programme, because I was looking for a chance to gain some experience in cooperation on international projects. That was my main motivation but actually Summer of HPC programme has a lot more to offer, even despite the fact we are working remotely because of the pandemic.
First of all, I will have a chance to work on HPC cluster, which is absolutely stunning and still unbelievable for me as I always have been passionate about working with computer clusters which can offer computing power which is unimaginable for someone like me, who have used just his personal computer throughout his life.
Secondly, there was a wide variety of projects to choose – actually there were 33 of them. That’s why I could choose the one which was the most appealing to me – as I study artificial intelligence, I chose one focused on building machine learning applications which are resilient to errors. Moreover, if we will have enough time, we are going to optimise created applications, so we will be able to deploy them on edge devices like mobile phones, which obviously don’t have as much computational power as supercomputers.

My teammate, mentors and workplace

I will work in cooperation with Enes Erciyes, with whom I have already talked a few times and he seems to be a great guy, so I recommend you to check out his introductory post, too. We will be mentored by Leonardo Bautista Gomez and Albert Njoroge Kahira from Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Supercomputer infrastructure is also provided by BSC – we will work on MareNostrum supercomputer which in June 2021 was ranked as 63rd most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 ranking. Most importantly we will have access to Power9 GPU cluster, which is especially useful in training deep learning models.

Wrap-up

I am pretty excited and can’t wait to start the work, especially after great training week organised by Irish Centre for High-End Computing staff during which I gained a lot of theoretical and practical knowledge on HPC.

Thanks for getting to this point, hopefully you have found this post interesting! If this is the case, I invite you to check out updates of this blog, which will be posted in upcoming weeks. Moreover, if you want to ask me any questions, feel free to do so in comment section below.