The student was hosted by BSC during the third edition of the PRACE Summer of HPC programme.
Greek student Simos Kazantzidis, who spent the Summer of HPC 2015 at BSC mentored by Fernando Cucchietti, has been awarded the PRACE Best Visualisation Award. He completed his visualisation project, which was selected by the SoHPC Award Adjudication Panel, during his placement in Barcelona. The aim of the project, titled “Graphical interface for real time monitoring, automatic event detection, and alert triggering in HPC parallel software”, was to learn about data visualisation techniques and technologies, particularly as applied to dashboard designs. The final project allows the visualisation of results of automated classification algorithms applied to molecule simulations, a technique used for drug discovery. The presentation of his visualisation may be found here:
“It was great working with Simos over the summer”, says Fernando Cucchietti, Data Pre and Post Processing Group Manager at BSC and Simos’ mentor in the SoHPC programme. "Simos integrated really well into the activities of the group, taking advantage of our combined expertise in data visualisation, programming and user experience. He absorbed all the knowledge we shared and incorporated it into his project.” Situated within the CASE department at BSC, the visualisation group creates high-end data visualisations to facilitate scientific communication to society. Their work has been recognised multiple times, winning awards such as the Best Video of 2012 Award for the video Alya Red: A Computational Heart in the International Scientific Visualization Challenge organised by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Science Journal.
BSC has a long tradition of participation in the SoHPC programme. In the first edition, the Slovenian student Vito Simonka was presented the PRACE HPC Ambassador Award in recognition of his outstanding outreach work. The PRACE Summer of HPC is one example of one a wide variety of education and mobility activities carried out at BSC. In line with its mission to become an educational centre of excellence, BSC provides training and professional opportunities aimed at students, researchers and industry (Master’s degrees, PhDs, workshops, etc.). Please visit our HPC Education and Training page for more information.
About the Summer of HPC
Summer of HPC is a PRACE programme that offers summer placements at HPC centres across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and early-stage postgraduate students. Up to 20 top applicants from across Europe are selected to participate every year. Participants spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work to produce a visualisation or video. The programme runs from 1 July to 31 August.