PRACE Summer of HPC 2018: Award Ceremony at Jülich Supercomputing Centre

The Summer of HPC (SoHPC) programme, now in its sixth year, allows 23 university students from all scientific disciplines to spend eight weeks of study hosted by a PRACE partner organisation. PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe has 25 member countries whose representative organisations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 5 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, CSCS representing Switzerland, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France).

In addition to allowing students to work on research projects in a multidisciplinary and international environment, the aim of the SoHPC programme is to promote and disseminate scientific culture among the upcoming generation of researchers, making sure that students participating in the project will be the computational scientists of tomorrow. Furthermore, through the sharing of their experience in blog posts and video presentations the programme aims to ensure that the students themselves become ambassadors of supercomputing at their respective institutions.

“SoHPC is the first step of PRACE’s commitment in fostering HPC, in training HPC specialists, and promoting simulation science. The systems we provide are important, but at the same level, or even more important for PRACE, is the training programme.” stated Florian Berberich (Project Management Officer of PRACE).

“PRACE wishes to inspire and encourage the next generation of software engineers, system administrators and generate users of HPC systems, in order to keep Europe at the forefront of supercomputing.” said Leon Kos (Coordinator of the project SoHPC).

The 2018 PRACE SoHPC Award Ceremony was held on 23 October at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Germany. Two out of 23 remarkable students were awarded prizes based on their performance and outreach during the programme.

This year's winners were Conor O'Mara and Sukhminder Singh, who presented their SoHPC experience at the ceremony along with the presentations of Florian Berberich (Project Management Officer of PRACE) and Ivo Kabadshow (JSC Coordinator of SoHPC).

Conor and Sukhminder received a voucher of 1500€ for attending an HPC conference of their choice along with a massive 1.5kg glass trophy each.

PRACE Summer of HPC 2018 Best Performance Award: Sukhminder Singh

Sukhminder Singh is an MSc student in Computational Engineering at Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen, Germany. During the PRACE Summer of HPC he worked on some C++ codes at Jaume I University, Castellón de la Plana, Spain.
Sukhminder excelled in a useful and technically demanding project and presented his work in a confident manner.
His blog posts and project video were well prepared and aimed to attract people and educate them about HPC systems. You can watch his video presentation at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gignTeoDlgE

PRACE Summer of HPC 2018 HPC Ambassador Award: Conor O'Mara

Conor O'Mara Conor is from Dublin, Ireland and has just finished a Bachelors in Theoretical Physics at Trinity College Dublin. For the PRACE Summer of
HPC programme he was based at the University of Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC).
Conor has worked well on his project and has shown a genuine desire to tell people about HPC in a clear scientific and comprehensive manner.
He was an active blogger, telling us about his project and time at EPCC, Edinburgh where he was carrying out his project.
Furthermore, his project video was well presented and understandable. You can watch his video presentation at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihg4QEx0lVo

More information to join the SoHPC programme can be found on the website: https://summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu/