The Slovenian student Vito Simonka, who spent the Summer of HPC at BSC mentored by Prof. Rosa M. Badia , has been awarded with the PRACE HPC Ambassador Award in recognition of his outstanding performance on the outreach spirit of the programmer with his blogging, media and social media presence. Vito studies his second master year of BioPhysics, Dynamical and Complex Systems at University of Maribor (Slovenia).
He was one of the 24 top applicants from across Europe selected to participate in the first edition of the PRACE Summer of HPC. He spent this summer working on the project “Task Based Parallelization using a top-down approach”.
The PRACE Summer HPC programme aims to ensure a positive experience for all students and to encourage them in their path to become the next generation of HPC students. As part of the programme, the 24 participants competed for two prizes: PRACE HPC Ambassador, won by Vito Simonka, and Best Visualisation, awarded to Niki Loppi (Aalto University, Finland) for the project “The aerodynamic modelling of supermarine spitfire”.
Today the awards had been presented by Dr. Sergi Girona, chair of the PRACE Board of Directors, at an Awards Ceremony at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). “I am impressed with the results of this first edition of the PRACE Summer of HPC: the 24 students all completed excellent projects and showed that they truly embody the future of HPC science and research,” has said Dr. Girona.
The PRACE Summer of HPC is an outreach programme, developed in the framework of the third PRACE Implementation Project (PRACE-3IP) that provided 24 undergraduate or postgraduate student’s placements at HPC centres across Europe in summer 2013. These students are the future generation of HPC users, system administrators, and software engineers and had the unique opportunity to work closely with PRACE experts, gaining experience on HPC systems through completing a visualisation project related to PRACE technical or industrial work.
For more information, please visit the Summer of HPC website: www.summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu.
