Dec. 3 — On 2 December 2013, Dr. Sergi Girona, chair of the PRACE Board of Directors, presented awards to two exceptional students in recognition of their outstanding performance on the PRACE Summer of HPC. Vito Simonka (University of Maribor, Slovenia) was named HPC Ambassador and Niki Loppi (Aalto University, Finland) received the award for Best Visualisation.

As part of the SoHPC programme, the twenty-four participants competed for two prizes – Best Visualisation and HPC Ambassador. The awards were presented by Dr. Sergi Girona, Chair of the PRACE Board of Directors, at an Awards Ceremony on 2 December 2013 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), Barcelona, Spain.

“I am very satisfied with the results of the PRACE Summer of HPC 2013,” said Dr. Girona.

The Best Visualisation Award was awarded to Niki Loppi who completed the best visualisation during his placement in Czech Republic, as judged by the SoHPC Award Adjudication panel. See his visualisation here.

Niki currently studies aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics at Aalto University School of Engineering. He is in his fifth year of studies and will start his master’s thesis in summer 2014. “The Summer of HPC combines learning and having fun. Working in a foreign research environment was an amazing experience and it definitely made eager to work abroad again,” said Niki. Read more about Niki here

The PRACE HPC Ambassador Award was awarded to Vito Simonka, who spent the Summer of HPC at BSC, Spain and best embodied the outreach spirit of the programme, based on his blogging, media and social media presence, and future outreach plans. See his blog here

Vito studies at University of Maribor, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Department of Physics. He is in his second master year of BioPhysics, Dynamical and Complex Systems. Short and sweet, Vito called the Summer of HPC “a life-changing experience.” Read more about Vito here

About the Summer of HPC

The PRACE Summer of HPC is an outreach programme, developed in the framework of the third PRACE Implementation Project (PRACE-3IP), that provided twenty-four 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.

The participants have diverse academic backgrounds, across undergraduate and postgraduate level in a wide variety of disciplines, studying in 17 different European countries. Throughout the summer, they blogged about their progress on the Summer of HPC website: www.summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu. The site also features student and project profiles. In addition the blog will features each of the students’ projects.

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 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements RI-261557, RI-283493 and RI-312763. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu

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Source: PRACE