¡Adiós amigos y amigas! – it was a pleasure working with you!
After all these technical posts I would like to wrap up with a personal one, highlighting my experience and shining a light on the people I met along the way.
The Summer of HPC 2022 was a really fun and, above all, valuable experience to me. I was able to get more confident in using and working with supercomputers as well as getting familiar with the HPC workflow in general. It was a great opportunity to refresh my interest and knowledge in nuclear fusion and to put my theoretical knowledge of molecular dynamics into practice by actively setting up and running simulations. Furthermore, I also really enjoyed the outreach aspect of the SoHPC programme. I tried to maintain an active blog with a coherent sequence of posts that build on each other and are interrelated. Sharing my posts on social media was always rewarded with positive responses, which further encouraged me. Collecting our results and creating the presentation slides and final video together with my colleague Arda Erbasan was also a great experience. The video can be watched below:
Speaking of my colleague Arda Erbasan, he was a really nice partner while working on the project and I enjoyed working with him. Arda brought a ton of experience in material science, especially DFT, which was of great value while working on the project. We had sophisticated discussions and it was easy to find solutions to problems arising during the work on this project. Go check out his blog!
Besides the scientific activities, I especially enjoyed the exchange with my mentors Mary Kate Chessey and Julio Gutiérrez Moreno. They have found a good balance of setting us targets and goals on the one hand and letting us experiment and explore things on our own on the other hand. In addition, they were always available and helpful, and the working atmosphere was a very pleasant one from the beginning. I also felt very welcome in the BSC Fusion Group lead by Mervi Johanna Mantsinen and I enjoyed the regular meetings where I had the chance to get a sneak peak into other peoples work in the field of computational methods in nuclear fusion.
Since my project was one of the online projects, I was based at home in Vienna most of the time. Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to meet another fellow SoHPC student and very talented ongoing researcher, Ezgi Sambur. She was assigned to project 2222 on HPC-Derived Affinity Enhancement of Antiviral Drugs in Vienna. You will find her blog here!
Ezgi is working in the field of computational chemistry and her project was dealing with computational drug design where she achieved excellent results. I met Ezgi in a park near the University of Technology in Vienna, where we had a lively discussion about our experiences
at the Summer of HPC porgamme but also chatted about our academic careers, our goals and ambitions, and other casual topics.
With all that being said, you see, my participation in the Summer of HPC 2022 was a very enriching experience, both from an intellectual as well as a social point of view. To anyone out there interested in computational science and technology and/or high performance computing and meeting new people from different backgrounds, I can only recommend applying!
Thank you very much to the PRACE Summer of HPC Team for the organisation and providing us students with this opportunity. Hope to see you again sometime, goodbye!
Leave a Reply