PRACE Summer of HPC 2020 Award Ceremony

The Award Ceremony traditionally takes place in the autumn of each year as a live event. The COVID- 19 pandemic made it impossible to continue this tradition, so the SoHPC organisation team chose to celebrate the Awards Ceremony 2020 during the digital training week of the 2021 edition of the PRACE Summer of HPC. Over 60 students joined remotely and celebrated with the winners.

In 2020, the PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) was held for the eighth time. The 2020 edition was entirely remotely set up due to the pandemic restrictions. The Training Week, which kicks off SoHPC, was virtually hosted by PRACE’Austrian Member, the Vienna Scientific Cluster of the Technical University of Vienna. Afterwards, the fifty university students from all scientific disciplines spent eight weeks studying and working on a dedicated HPC project. They were supported and mentored online by a tutor from one of the PRACE HPC Centres.

Besides allowing students to work on research projects in a multidisciplinary and international environment, the SoHPC programme aims to promote and disseminate scientific culture among the upcoming generation of researchers, ensuring that students participating in the project will be the computational scientists of tomorrow.

Furthermore, the students shared their experience in blog posts and video presentations and became ambassadors of High-Performance Computing at their respective institutions.

“The PRACE SoHPC programme aims to inspire and encourage the next generation of software engineers and system administrators to embrace a career in High-Performance Computing and promote simulation science. This programme is an integral part of the wide range of PRACE training activities offered through our partners to support the efficient use of HPC and keep Europe on the cutting edge of supercomputing,” said Serge Bogaerts, PRACE Managing Director.

“As Summer of HPC coordinator, every year, I am impressed by the enthusiasm and performance of all the students tackling demanding HPC projects with ease.The Summer of HPC 2020 edition showed that accessing EU HPC sites and collaborating with mentors and teammates on the project from home is as effective as being on-site. We are proud to highlight the winners of these efforts, they are an example for future generations, demonstrating HPC awareness and results gained,” said Leon Kos, Coordinator of the SoHPC.

The three winners, Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail, Igor Abramov and Josip Bobinac held a short presentation about their project and shared their SoHPC experience at the ceremony.

Each winner received a voucher of € 1 500 which can be used to attend an HPC conference of their choice, and an engraved glass trophy.

Both Igor and Josip had to deal with a very complicated HPC problem with extensive mathematical knowledge and advanced C++ skills required to write templated code to speed-up the most critical part of their project. Most importantly, both worked very hard on their project and did so as a team, presenting their work in the final video in a way, which despite its complexity, can be understood by most audiences: FMM&GPU

Antonios is well aware of the responsibilities of a HPC Ambassador in presenting, disseminating and discussing his HPC experience with others, encouraging and inspiring his peers to follow a similar path to his in the world of HPC. He has done this through his well-explained and comprehensible blog posts and his final project video: Performance of Parallel Python Programs on New HPC Archs

More information about the Summer of HPC programme and how to apply can be found on the programme’s website: www.summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu