On 15 – 28 November 2021, 2nd year Master degree students from the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Control Processes of St. Petersburg University passed their pre-graduation practice at the Meshcheryakov Laboratory of Information Technologies. Simultaneously with the SPBU group, students from the Institute of Science-Intensive Technologies and Advanced Materials of the Far Eastern Federal University came to MLIT for a longer practice.

The students’ research covers a wide variety of topics, including interactive data processing, distributed computing, parallel applications, databases, biomonitoring, nuclear and experimental physics.

During the practice, leading MLIT specialists described the major areas of activity of the Laboratory of Information Technologies. The HybriLIT Heterogeneous Computing Group (O.I. Streltsova, M.I. Zuev, A.S. Ayriyan, I.S. Pelevanyuk) held a series of lectures on the OpenMP and MPI parallel programming technologies and tutorials on the OpenCL framework. Within the excursion around MLIT, students learned about interesting facts from the history of the Laboratory, outstanding scientists whose names are inseparable from the MLIT’s formation and development, and the JINR Multifunctional Information and Computing Complex, which comprises the “Govorun” supercomputer.

Students also visited the Veksler and Baldin Laboratory of High Energy Physics and met with D. K. Dryablov who told them about the NICA megaproject in detail and with great enthusiasm: what the accelerator complex under construction consists of, what is its uniqueness, what experiments are planned to be performed on it, what is happening at the Factory of Superconducting Magnets. The students visited the building where the Nuclotron control panel is located.

On 16 – 17 November, students participated in the 3rd School for Young Scientists “High-performance platforms for the digital economy and megascience projects”, which was organized by Plekhanov Russian University of Economics together with MLIT. The goal of the School held in a mixed format was to acquaint young scientists, postgraduates and students with modern high-performance platforms and their application for the tasks of the digital economy and large-scale scientific projects. Leading specialists in Big Data analytics, cloud and supercomputer technologies delivered lectures to the students.

The knowledge and experience gained during the practice enabled the students to broaden their horizons and take a fresh look at their projects.

Photos by Alexey Vorontsov, Ekaterina Voytishina, Daria Priakhina