Both Sides of PRACE "Summer of HPC"

For the second time, JSC participated in the PRACE "Summer of HPC". This programme offers summer placements for undergraduate and postgraduate students at HPC centres across Europe. Twenty candidates were selected from a pool of highly skilled and motivated applicants from all over Europe. The successful students then participated in on-going research projects at ten different HPC centres, in the period from 1 July to 31 August 2015. Travel and accommodation costs, as well as a grant towards expenses, were provided by PRACE to all successful applicants.

However, it was not only the interested students who had to apply for the programme, also the hosting HPC centres had to undergo a competitive selection process. This year, there were two applications from JSC: one as a host for students with a strong interest in learning how to optimize code for our supercomputers, and a second one from JSC master student Jana Boltersdorf, who applied to spend the summer outside Germany at a different HPC site.

Both our applications were successful. While Sarah Jenkins (UK) and Albert Garcia (Spain) joined JSC for the summer to gain first-hand experience in day-to-day research, Jana Boltersdorf went to Edinburgh, where she worked on parallelizing a fluctuating finite element analysis (FFEA) tool via MPI. Albert and Sarah were supervised by Andreas Beckmann and Stefan Krieg, working on a molecular dynamics code based on the fast multipole method (FMM) and on optimizing compute kernels from lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD). Details on the "Summer of HPC" projects with blogs and videos by the participants can be found at https://summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu/.
(Contact: Dr. Ivo Kabadshow, i.kabadshow@fz-juelich.de)

JSC News, 21 September 2015