In the fifth edition of the PRACE Summer of HPC, BSC is hosting two students: Anton Lebedev from Germany and Aleksander Wennersteen from the UK. During July and August, the students will work on the following research projects in Barcelona:
| Research Project | Mentor | Student |
|---|---|---|
| Hybrid Monte Carlo Method for Matrix Computation on P100 GPUs | Vassil Alexandrov | Anton Lebedev |
| Monte Carlo and Deep Learning Methods for Enhancing Crowd Simulation | Vassil Alexandrov & Isaac Rudomin | Aleksander Wennersteen |
Both students are learning how to apply the Monte Carlo method to solve different problems: Anton is focusing on matrix computation whereas Aleksander is working on crowd simulation. The students will produce a presentation, video, report and a Blog post at the end of the process. The results will be published on the PRACE Summer of HPC website. The students have also participated in PUMPS 2017, sponsored by the GPU Centre of Excellence BSC-UPC.
“Monte Carlo methods usually due to its nature provides a high level of parallelism. Combined with the latest advances in deep learning, Monte Carlo is expected to provide very efficient solutions in both cases and will allow the students to acquire highly sought skills needed to solve data and computationally intensive problems,” says Vassil Alexandrov, BSC Extreme Computing group manager and mentor of both PRACE Summer of HPC students.
The PRACE Summer of HPC is one example of the wide range of education and mobility activities carried out at BSC. In accordance with its mission to become an educational centre of excellence, BSC provides training and professional opportunities to students, researchers and industry (Master’s degrees, PhDs, workshops, etc.).
BSC and PRACE Summer of HPC
BSC has a long tradition of participation in the PRACE Summer of HPC programme. In the first edition in 2013, the Slovenian student Vito Simonka, who spent the Summer of HPC at BSC mentored by Prof. Rosa M. Badia, won the PRACE HPC Ambassador Award in recognition of his outstanding outreach spirit, through activities in blogging, media and social media presence. In addition, in the third edition of the programme, Greek student Simos Kazantzidis, who spent the Summer of HPC 2015 at BSC mentored by Fernando Cucchietti, was awarded the PRACE Best Visualisation Award. His work entitled “Graphical interface for real time monitoring, automatic event detection, and alert triggering in HPC parallel software” allowed the visualisation of results of automated classification algorithms applied to molecule simulations, a technique used for drug discovery. In 2015, BSC hosted the PRACE Summer of HPC training week. Recently, Luna Backes, who participated in the first edition of Summer of HPC and was a researcher at BSC during 2014 and 2015, participated in an article promoting the PRACE Summer of HPC encouraging students to participate in future editions. This is a good example of how the Summer of HPC can help researchers advance their careers.
About PRACE Summer of HPC
The PRACE Summer of HPC is a PRACE outreach and training programme that offers summer placements at top HPC centres across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and early-stage postgraduate students. Up to twenty top applicants from across Europe are selected to participate. Participants spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work. At the end of their stay, they produce a report, visualisation or video of their results.
This year, the programme runs from 3 July to 27 August 2017, with a kick-off training week at IT4I Supercomputing Centre in Ostrava attended by all participants. Flights, accommodation and a stipend are provided to all successful applicants. Two prizes will be awarded to the participants who produce the best project (Best Visualisation Award) and best embody the outreach spirit of the programme (HPC Ambassador Award).