From 7 to 12 December fourth-year students from SPTI MEPhI have had a practical work at the MEPhI Department №5 in the Laboratory of engineering computer modeling in the framework of a program of academic mobility.

According to the head of the laboratory G.V. Tikhomirov, the main purpose of the practice is to acquaint students with the principle of parallel computing. “Students were engaged in modeling and programming, solved problems associated with nuclear energy and nuclear physics”, explained Georgiy Valentinovich. All fourth-year students were from the faculty of information technology. But students must be experts not only in IT, but also physicists.

Young teachers, postgraduate students Ivan Saldikov and Rinat Bogdanovich were specially invited to lead the practice. “We prepared ourselves that there would be people who are not aware of the topic. We had to explain nuclear physics from scratch. My task was to talk about the Monte Carlo method, which also is applicable to solve mathematical problems. During this practice I learned something new from the students as well. So it was a good experience,” said Rinat.

Ivan worked with students on parallelization and programming. “The goal of this course is to show practical use of calculations paralleling for neutron-physical computations. We demonstrated that it’s possible and necessary to combine nuclear physics with modern computing. At the end of the practice students remotely performed calculations on a compact supercomputer. The peculiarity of this work lies in the fact that students and mini-super computers were in different rooms”, said Ivan.

According to postgraduates students were well prepared and enthusiastically mastered new material.