PRACE Summer of HPC brings the summer to Edinburgh

The projects are preceded by a training week, hosted this year by EPCC in Edinburgh alongside ARCHER and PRACE Advanced Training Centre courses. The training week is designed to build a community between the Summer of HPC participants and to provide the necessary skills for students to begin their projects. Flights and accommodation are provided by the programme with a stipend to cover living costs.

The Edinburgh contingent 

Three lucky participants remained in Edinburgh to undertake their projects at EPCC while the rest went to their allocated computing centres and projects. The Edinburgh group are:

Conor O'Mara

Hello, my name is Conor O'Mara and I am 22 years old and from Dublin, Ireland. I have recently completed a bachelors in Theoretical Physics from Trinity College Dublin. I am working under the supervision of Dr Nick Johnson on a project in NEXTGENIO which simulates how jobs are allocated on a HPC system, looking at the effectiveness of different job-scheduling algorithms.

In my free time, if I am not writing emails to Channel 4 requesting it adds "THE THE's INFECTED" to its programming schedule, staring at a computer screen that says 'error cannot compile', or trying to improve on my current record of 24 hours asleep in a row, then I am probably playing golf. I was Captain of Trinity’s golf team and in September 2017 we actually toured Scotland and played the University of Edinburgh in a match at Gullane Golf Club. What a coincidence.

Eva Havelková

My name is Eva and I am a Numerical and Computational mathematics student from Prague, Czech Republic. My main field of interest is numerical linear algebra, specifically all kinds of matrix calculations. Just recently, I started to focus on discrete inverse problems and regularisation as a part of my Masters thesis which studies algebraic methods for single particle reconstruction, ie particle shape reconstruction from projections. Outside of university I enjoy playing sports, mainly Ultimate Frisbee (which is not just me randomly throwing a frisbee to a friend in a park!), solving puzzles, travelling, eating chocolates, cooking and flipping pancakes. I am slightly addicted to coffee and my favourite movie character is Dave the Minion.

This summer, I decided get a break from maths and I joined EPCC to work on parallel computation demonstrations on Wee Archie as a part of the PRACE Summer of HPC 2018 programme. I will be working under the supervision of Dr David Henty and Dr Oliver Brown. My main goal here is to develop a simple program(s) that would demonstrate how parallel computers work and communicate by programming a set of LED lights attached to each node of a small Raspberry Pi-based cluster.

Jakub Mojsiejuk

I'm an Electronics and Telecommunications undergraduate at AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. Areas of particular interest to me are network engineering, spintronics, statistical learning and quantum computing.

At EPCC I work on an Environmental Monitoring Baseline (EMB) system for data streaming. My main task is to tweak its different software components so that they utilise state-of-the-art technologies and follow the best current practices in the business. My supervisors for that project are Dr. Amy Krause and Dr Rosa Filgueira.

Find out more

To keep abreast of what the participants are doing visit the PRACE Summer of HPC blog.