Each year since 2014, UQ and RCC have sponsored high school students from Brisbane’s Queensland Academy for Science, Mathematics and Technology (QASMT) or Faith Lutheran College (Redlands) to attend the international Supercomputing Conference. They join students from Melbourne’s John Monash Science School at the event.
This year, three Year 10 students from QASMT were selected to attend SC17, held in Denver, Colorado, 12–17 November 2017.
Below, QASMT Year 10 student Jayden Lyttle describes his experience at SC17.
By Jayden Lyttle
During term four, three students from QASMT were given the opportunity to extend our personal knowledge of HPC with a trip to the international supercomputing conference SC17.
During the trip, we were also given the ability to bond with fellow students from the John Monash Science School, building friendships that I hope will last for a long time.
At SC17, I explored many aspects of HPC that I had never even realised were part of the field during the trip. From learning about Microsoft's own supercomputer, and teaching cars to drive using machine learning, to exploring the basics of the HPC behind the Large Hadron Collider.
The most eye-opening experience for me was when I visited a session exploring cancer and the HPC implications on how to help resolve it. They explored the ability to do a digital 'roadmap' of the tumour (similar to what you can do in Google Earth) from a view of the whole tumour, down to a view of the individual cells.
Another massive point for me was exploring the implications of mathematics in HPC, where I learnt how little about mathematical computing I really knew, and how much there still is for me to explore. This was also the same outcome for me for two other major talks I attended — the materials engineering talk, and the talk on quantum computing we attended at the start of the conference.
I thoroughly enjoyed this tour, and would do it again in a heartbeat. In this trip, I learnt about not just one, but many possible career futures for me, and in the process made some new friends.
