PRACE Summer of HPC 2020 Award Ceremony at ISC

June 30, 2021 — Serge Bogaerts, PRACE Managing Director, announced the PRACE Summer of HPC Awards 2020 to Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail, Igor Abramov, and Josip Bobinac during an online award ceremony held on Wednesday 30 June 2021 at the virtual PRACE booth at ISC 2021. The
three students received the awards for their exceptional performance and outreach during their participation in the PRACE Summer of HPC 2020.

The Award Ceremony traditionally takes place in the autumn of each year as a live event. The COVID19 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 50 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 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 PRACE Summer of HPC 2020 HPC Ambassador Award
Antonios-Kyrillos Chatzimichail 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

About PRACE
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class High-Performance Computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by five PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, ETH Zurich/CSCS representing Switzerland, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020) under grant agreement 823767. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu