In March 2017 I got invited to the CINECA supercomputing facility in Casaleccio di Reno near Bologna in Italy. They had recently installed their latest system, the Marconi A2 powered by Intel Xeon Phi 7250 CPUs. My colleague Peter and I had worked on the QPhiX library which explicitly targets these type of processors.

Both of us applied for this two day workshop and got accepted with our talk. Although the workshop started at noon and ended at noon the following day, it was cheaper for us to stay two more nights and take other flights. Fortunately Lenovo covered both the flight and the hotel, so this trip was pretty much a gift. Also we did not have to book anything, we just got a flight ticket send to us.

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Für heute war unsere Exkursion nach Brüssel angesetzt. Brüssel klingt ja nach einer potentiell interessanten Stadt. Und was soll schon schief gehen, wenn sich 12 Physiker, Mathematiker, Chemiker und Informatiker mit dem Auto auf den Weg machen?

Spannenderweise hat sich erst gestern spät abends geklärt, wann wir eigentlich heute losfahren wollen. Irgendwann setzte einer einfach 9:00 fest.

Am nächsten Morgen bin ich irgendwann wach geworden und es war 8:25. „Verdammt" dachte ich und machte mich fertig. Für Frühstück war dann allerdings keine Zeit mehr. Für frisches Brot holen erst recht nicht mehr. Also habe ich mir Knäckebrot für die Fahrt geschmiert. Später habe ich herausgefunden, dass der Wecker nicht geklingelt hatte, weil der eigentlich nur für Wochentage (die ich normalerweise in Bonn bin) aktiv war. Gut, mein Fehler.

Um 9:01 war ich dann unten vor dem Gästehaus. Jedoch waren nur drei andere Gaststudenten dort -- nicht die ganze Gruppe. Super, dann hätte ich ja noch in Ruhe frühstücken können. Dann kamen so nach und nach die Leute herunter. Der eine hatte nur ein T-Shirt an. Seine Freundin wies ihn dann darauf hin, dass er sich doch vielleicht noch etwas anziehen sollte. Also ist er dann mit dem Aufzug erstmal nach oben gefahren …

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Am Dienstag sind wir noch einmal die Sophienhöhe rauf gefahren. Uns wurde noch der Tagebau gezeigt und etwas zur Geschichte der Sophienhöhe erzählt.

Das hier war die Tour:

Und noch das Höhenprofil:

Auf nassen Sandstraßen mit Rädern mit nur einem Gang durchaus eine Herausforderung.

In spring of 2015, we have been at Hacienda Buena Suerte.

This is is the main building where our room was located in:

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In my German high school I took the intensive physics course (Leistungskurs). The university of Bonn organized a so called "Master Class of Particle Physics". A couple of students of each high school would get to attend, and I got to participate.

At the time I did not know much about physics, so I did not know about the divide into theoretical and experimental physics. Also I did not have any opinions about the two sides and would have an idea what (usually humorous) grudges each have against the other. So we had a lecture by the experimentalists about particle physics and how they are detected. Basically we looked at electron-position-collisions and their results into leptons (electron, muon, tau) and hadron jets. We would learn to classify these events. Incidentally I did this later on in the lab course during my studies with a computer program. More accurate and much faster.

On the second day we were sitting in a computer room and were tasked to go through 100 events. Each team of two got different events, and in total we were around 10 groups. We classified around 1000 events on that day. Then later we had a video conference with the organizers of the class from CERN. Michael was a senior employee working in the outreach program, Daniel a PhD student if I recall correctly. During that conference each university would transmit their results and the people at CERN tally them up. In the end we got a result with around ten thousand events.

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In 2009 we had two school trips to choose from: Barcelona in Spain and Prague in the Czech Republic. I chose the latter mostly because the bus ride would be shorter.

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I spent the eleventh grade of my high school in the USA. At the time a couple classmates did similar trips, though most of them went to Canada. In total I have spend ten months there, it was an amazing time. I met many new people, got to speak the language much better and got so many new experiences.

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