Two L’s and two J’s

Juelich, Germany:

I’d like to begin with a little description of the introduction week in Germany, Juelich. Arriving on the Sunday, I was greeted by my roommate and a fabulous cup of English Tea with milk. As the famous saying goes “A week in the bed a lifetime in the head”(Hewitt2016). We had a cosy little room, tucked away on the 5th floor, with a single, but large, bed. For those of you unfortunate enough to have never shared a bed, here is a little self-help page of things to consider. I must say, we had an unforgettable week together.

The first week was spent learning about numerous parallel computing paradigms, for those scrabblers out there that’s a 15 pointer and if you are not a scrabbler please close this page now. I got a little emotional about scrabble just then, however to continue, we looked at OpenMP, MPI, CUDA and In Situ Visualisation. Even though the days were long, you don’t notice them when you are surrounded by a great bunch of people. I have added some photos of the gang below, doing our best to relax after the long days . Side note: Center image, notice a certain someone who is too cool to look at the camera.

The herd relaxing after a hard day

A highlight of the week was definitely go karting on the Thursday afternoon, at the place where @SchumiOfficial first began perfecting his craft. Fun fact: Michael Schumacher also loves HPC and described it as his second most enjoyable hobby. I honestly just made that up, but I reckon his love of efficiency and speed would translate well into HPC programming.

Dirac deltas are about to drop their Summer 16 mixtape

Friday saw the end of week shindig, that involved plenty of food, drinks and great company, as well as an encounter with the police. I bet you all thought a bunch of computer lovers like us couldn’t do anything bad, well you were right, they merely wanted to express their enjoyment of our rapping about HPC, for more details on the songs sung please visit “www.ofcoursewedidntrapabouthpc.co.uk“. My final remark about Juelich must be towards the people from the HPC center that took great care of us. They were incredible, keeping us well fed and happy all week.

Ljubljana, Slovenia:

Less than average photograph of Bled Lake

Arriving at the airport in Frankfurt I was greeted by the wonderful sight of my site coordinator the world famous Leon Kos, who loves a good kernel, and was once heard saying “Too much GUI you know” (Lango2016), quite a foreign feeling for lazy people such as myself. After a short flight we arrived in Ljubljana, the heat was quite a shock but nothing on what some of the other participants will have to endure. Expectations of my time in Slovenia sky rocketed as I jumped in the car with Leon, expecting to be dropped off at my dorm and begin working, Leon took another approach and after flying down the motorway,  we arrived in a little place called Bled.

I must apologize, my abilities in photography lie outside of landscapes or anything remotely beautiful. Alas, however bad my photography skills are; Bled was rather quite lovely. After Leon and I enjoyed a walk around the lake and a trip up to the castle, which turned out was quite the excursion, we headed to Ljubljana for what would be a very appreciated good nights rest.

Monday 11th, a day I will never forget, the official beginning of the project. I will try to summarize my weeks work in a few sentences, but squeezing such an experience into a word limit is difficult, especially when you go on tangents about word limits . I began by looking at OpenCascade, which  is a C++ library that is used for building and generating geometric models.

First Opinions: Its fantastic,  writing a Python equivalent of a simple C++ example (code), took only a couple of hours. The example generates a box with a hole, and a STEP file of the geometry. For you “geniji” and C++ experts this may seem trivial but for us mere mortals, its wonderful. I had to stop early for the day with shear excitement, of the time this software is going to save me. I don´t want to say I have the visualization award wrapped up, but I am quite confident, Casing point below:

Box, Box with a hole and hip flask

In all seriousness, just building such simple shapes gives your a good introduction to the wide capabilities of OpenCASCADE. I have much more to talk about concerning my project including some of the cool “stuff” to do with the Tokamak, but you will have to wait until next time. Hopefully this is mysterious enough to make you want to read the next blog.

I have spent all morning writing this, so I haven’t technically done any work yet today. Therefore I’ll finish with a small snippet of what you should expect next time. We have “Lunch with Lango”,, some more photography of the amazing views we experienced whilst hiking, some thoughts about Trieste, Italy, and of course the exciting work I am doing at the moment.

nikoli niste prestari za nakup zelenih banan.