You don’t know my name, nor my story (yet)

Get to know me

Hello everyone! I am Theodoros Aslanidis and I am so pumped for PRACE Summer of HPC 2021! Before Ι talk about my participation in the program and specifically about the project that I will work on with my partner, I would like to say a few things about myself.

I am 22 years old, I was born in Athens, Greece and grew up in Nafpaktos, a small picturesque seaside town where I lived until I got into university in Volos. This year I completed the fourth year of my studies at the University of Thessaly as an undergraduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I discovered my love for computers quite early, while I was in elementary school where they sparked my interest and I wanted to know how these complex machines work. So, when I was about 15 years old I had my first contact with programming and I was sure then what subject I would study in the future.

One of my favourite university courses I took was High Performance Computing, in which I learned a lot about this part of computer science as I worked on OpenMP and CUDA projects. This was the main reason that gave me the motivation to send my application to PRACE SoHPC 2021, which I am really excited to be a part of.

How I learned about Summer of HPC programme

I first found out about SoHPC last summer when I was scrolling through my facebook homepage and saw a post from a friend of mine who had taken part in it and shared his experience. His name is Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail and some of you may know him as, during the training week, he won last year’s best ambassador award and spoke about his own involvement in SoHPC. I was quite curious to find out what exactly it was about and as soon as I received an email from my university regarding SoHPC 2021 edition, I could not resist sending my application.

Waiting for my application results…

Several months past and I had not received an email from PRACE, so I thought that I was probably rejected and I felt devastated. But, as it turned out, all the emails had ended up in the spam folder! Actually, there were several of them informing me that I had been selected and I was pleasantly surprised and relieved. At that time, Summer of HPC was the only thing that occupied my little mind!

More about my team’s project

Due to the experience I had gained through my university’s HPC course in graphics card programming using CUDA, the project that seemed the most interesting to me and which I chose to work on during this summer is 2130: Designing Scientific Applications on GPUs organized by ULux-University of Luxembourg. Through my involvement with this project, I intend to expand my knowledge on CUDA programming by implementing scientific applications on graphics cards. Already knowing the basics of the architecture of the GPU and its computing power, being able to run scientific applications on a GPU sounds like an exciting and interesting challenge.

So, what has happened so far?

This year’s training week is over. Due to the pandemic we could not meet in person, however the experience was immersive. I met my partner and my mentor and we had a little chat about what exactly we will do in the project. Our first task is to take a look at PETSc which is a toolkit for scientific applications. Can’t wait to start working on this intriguing project! I will keep you informed about our progress, see you in my next blog post!

Bonus! My debugging assistant