Wojtek Laskowski

Hi,

My name is Wojtek, I’m 25 years old and thrilled to announce that I’m spending this summer in Barcelona, Spain. Besides leaving home for 2 months for one of the most fascinating places in the world, I’ll also be working on the Adaptive multi-partitioning for the parallel solution of PDEs under the supervision of researchers from Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

But first things first, let’s put all the excitement on the back burner (for a while). Here’s a short description of myself and how I ended up in the heart of Catalonia.

Photo taken during the training week in Edinburgh. Trying to make the best use of my free time and find the perfect view of the city.

I am originally from Lublin, a small city in the South-East part of Poland. Quickly after finishing high school I moved to Warsaw, the capital city, to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. For my graduate degree, I sought a bigger challenge. I decided to move to Copenhagen, Denmark and start Master studies in Applied Mechanics at Technical University of Denmark.

Ever since my undergraduate studies I was interested in simulating engineering problems (fluid flow, plasticity etc) and numerical analysis. But it was only during my Master studies that I started to explore more and more what’s within the engine of computer simulation software and slowly exchange engineering classes (bye, bye commercial programs) for more specific, mathematical and programming orientated courses (hello Unix shell).

This is where I stand right now, finishing my master thesis, in which I try to design an efficient iterative strategy to speed up nonlinear wave simulations. With (hopefully) successful completion of the thesis I hope to make my own small contribution in the analysis of ocean wave propagation and wave-body interactions.

My interest in Computational Fluid Dynamics was the primary reason I signed up for the PRACE Summer of HPC programme. I believe that my new experiences in parallel programming can make my contribution a little bit bigger, as it allows for even faster simulations. On my way here I only discovered more reasons to join the event. Visiting Scotland for a week with a bunch of very smart individuals and then spending the summer in the most popular Spanish city while working on an interesting project doesn’t sound bad at all, does it?

Another photo from the Training Week. Finally free after whole day of programming.

When I am not pondering on a math problem, I either play or watch football with some breaks to look after my early cactus plantation (consisting of 2 cacti so far) and play board games with my friends in an unusually competitive manner. However, all of this will now be set aside for 2 months in favor of exploring the Iberian Peninsula in greater depth.