User:Robbbs88

Public application template

A: An introduction

• My name is Roberto Porcù, I'm italian and I'm 25 years old. I've studied Maths Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and I graduated 22 April 2013. On November 2013 I will start the PhD program at Politecnico di Milano.
  • I can speak italian and english.
  • My overall background: numerical computing, maths, physics, applied maths, optimization, parallel computing, cfd.
• I want to partecipate to SOCIS to increase my knowledge about some topics and take part to the development of programs.
  • No previous experiences in SOCIS.
• I used Octave very much during my university career and I like Open Source programs, I want to help in developing Octave and make it better than other non-free programs.

C: Contact

• Nickname: robbbs88
• I will be in Toronto (Canada) until September the 5 and here it is UTC-5. After September the 5 I will be in Italy (UTC+1).
• I usually code around 10.00 to 17.00 and could also try to start earlier (~9.00) for few days.

E: Coding experience

This part is one of the more important ones in your application. You are allowed to be as verbose as you want, as long as you stay on topic ;-)

• I've a good experience with C++ and Octave because I've used them a lot at university, for many exams.
• I've a good experience with Fortran, OpenMP, MPI and CUDA.
• I've worked together with 4 other students for an exam at university. We had to work for 3 different days on a project, for 5 hours per day and each time we had to complete a different project, usually on data structures and Algebric algorithms such as matrices decomposition.
• The biggest code I've written was for my thesis. I took an exsisting code written in Fortran that was useful to simulate the Brownout effect and I modified this code to make it working in parallel on 2 GPUs NVIDIA Tesla 2070M-Q using CUDA for Fortran.
• I've not yet contributed to Octave but I've written in Octave a class of solutors for classical Hamiltonian mechanics systems which makes use of Spectral Variational Integrators.

F: Feeling fine

• Please describe (in short) your experience with the following tools:
  • IRC and mailing lists: good experience.
  • Mercurial or other source code management systems: not big experience.
  • Mediawiki or other wiki software: not big experience.
  • make, gcc, gdb or other development tools: very good experience.
• What will make you actively stay in our community after this GSoC is over? Work on other applications close or not to what I've already done.

O: Only out of interest

• I've heard about Octave at the university.
  • I've been involved in using Octave for at least 4 years at the university.

P: Prerequisites

• I work with Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 12.10.
  • If you have access to more than one, please state them and the conditions under which you are granted this access.
• Please estimate an average time per day you will be able to access
  • an internet connection: 12 hours
  • a computer: 12 hours
  • a computer with your progressing work on: 12 hours
• Please describe the degree up to which you can install new software on computers you have access to: complete possibility to install new software.

S: Self-assessment

• Please describe how useful criticism looks from your point of view as committing student.
• How autonomous are you when developing? If you answer both subquestions with "Yes, definitely", we are a tad confused. ;-)
  • Do you like to discuss changes intensively and not start coding until you know what you want to do?
  • Do you like to code a proof of concept to 'see how it turns out', modifying that and taking the risk of having work thrown away if it doesn't match what the project or original proponent had in mind?

Y: Your task

• Did you select a task from our list of proposals and ideas?
  • If yes, what task did you choose? Please describe what part of it you especially want to focus on if you can already provide this information. Please also wiki-link the page for your elaborated proposal here.
  • If you apply for a task you have added yourself instead, please describe this task, its scope and people you already talked to concerning it. What field of tasks did you miss on the list?
• Please provide a rough estimated timeline for your work on the task. This should include the GSoC midterms and personal commitments like exams or vacation ("non-coding time"). Optionally include two or three milestones you expect.