Introducing RACKlette Team Member: Simon Wachter

I got into computers at a “fairly late” age, I think I was about 17, but I had used computers my whole life. When I was younger I played many videogames, I actually still do. This transitioned me into being interested in everything about computers. My first deeper dive was for my Maturaarbeit (A long essay everyone has to write when attempting to get the Matura, like a thesis for school), for which I programmed an odd's calculator for Poker. For that matter I learned Java and, a bit later, I built my first own PC. Since then I built a few other PC's and am running a server in my basement. That's where I came into contact with Linux for the first time. I spent many fun hours setting up the server, it is now being used by close friends and family members for various applications.

When I started my studies at ETH, I gained much knowledge about the inner workings of computers and learned about algorithms. This also gave me a new perspective, since I now know what is going on in those highly complex systems. In the second semester, we learned how to get programs to run in parallel in Prof. Hoefler's “Parallel Programming” lecture. In theory, we talked about thousands of CPU cores, but in practice, I was working on my laptop with a quad-core CPU. I wanted to go bigger! That is where RACKlette comes in.

I joined the team after their presentation in the parallel programming lecture. Being granted access to the Emmentaler cluster, everything was scaled up. I had already worked with the Linux-Terminal, so that wasn't new to me, but seeing this massive computing power and being able to access it from your laptop amazed me. I have run some LINPACK test's and am currently working on the GROMACS application for SC20. While the cloud resources for SC20 had some issues in the beginning, we are now testing and optimizing the applications there, which is an entirely new experience in and of itself. With all this, I am very excited to compete at SC20's and future student cluster competitions.