15-Year-Old JSC Trainee among Intel ISEF Finalists

The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) is the world's largest international pre-college science competition. Student participants are ninth- through twelfth-graders who earned the right to compete at this annual event by winning a top prize at a local, regional, state, or national science fair. Former JSC trainee Adrian Lenkeit got the opportunity to participate in the 66th ISEF, along with more than 1700 students from over 70 countries, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from 10 to 15 May 2015.

Adrian qualified for the finals after winning the fourth prize at the German national competition “Jugend forscht 2014” with his own C++/CUDA N-body solver for a GPU. In addition to the computation of the pairwise interactions, he also visualized the trajectories via OpenCL. As a student of the St. Michael-Gymnasium in Bad Münstereifel, he had to complete mandatory two-week training, which he carried out at JSC a few weeks before the science fair. The goal of the hands-on training was to boost the performance of the code and introduce multi-GPU support via MPI utilizing JSC's own GPU cluster JUDGE for a larger simulation. With the help of the 3D visualization capabilities of JSC's Rotunda and stereoscopic additions to his OpenCL code, he even presented his results to a TV reporter team working for national broadcaster WDR prior to Intel ISEF. After the trip to Pittsburgh, the local newspaper Kölnische Rundschau covered his participation on 20 May: Adrian was ranked fourth as one of the youngest attendees in the Intel ISEF competition and won $ 500.
(Contact: Dr. Ivo Kabadshow, i.kabadshow@fz-juelich.de)

JSC, 27 May 2015