When a mathematician is not good at mental arithmetic,…

…there is a very simple solution to this this problem: Take one of the most powerful computers in the world and let it do all calculations for you. In the twinkling of an eye, it can perform more arithmetic operations than one human being could do in their whole lifetime – a good reason to familiarize yourself with this topic, isn’t it?

From mathematics to computational sciences

My name is Theresa Vock and during my studies of Technical Mathematics at Vienna University of Technology I always appreciated the beauty of elegant, efficient and sometimes unconventional solutions to different problems. Getting in touch with programming in order to solve mathematical tasks, I discovered my interest in high performance computing and parallel programming. As a consequence, I am excited to enlarge my field of expertise during this summer of HPC.

Matrix exponentiation, France and me

I was very happy when I discovered a project based on linear algebra and even happier when I found out that it was taking place in France because I absolutely fell for that country the first time I visited it. So I applied immediately and I was very excited when I got accepted. For the next weeks, I am going to work on different algorithms to calculate the exponential of a complex matrix remotely from Vienna. The final goal is an implementation that works efficiently for a GPU architecture using the MAGMA library. I cannot wait to work on the Jean-Zay machine, one of the fastest clusters in Europe. Of course I am going to keep you up to date on the progress we are making!

For now, I am trying to get at least a little bit of French flair to my flat during the summer by having some croissant and Pain au Chocolat in the morning and some baguette and Camembert for dinner.