Dear STEM-Trek,
It has been an exciting journey at CERN, and time flies! This is my eighth and final week, and I will fly home on Sunday. Every moment has been enjoyable: academically, professionally and socially. I am super excited to have learned so much in such a short amount of time! I worked with an exceptionally skilled and diverse support team, and am now motivated to master more HPC applications since I’ve seen how they’re used across disciplines.
Our Neutrino cluster is progressing well. We managed to solve most of the problems we were experiencing the last time I wrote. As I mentioned, the system was configured with Puppet and its suite of tools (Puppet DB, Facter, Puppet Manifests, Hiera, and mCollective). Foreman’s web interface was useful to register nodes.
Earlier this week, I visited the CERN Control Centre and SuperConducting (SC) Magnets facility. I learned how many of the LHC components work, and how SC magnets bend and tighten particle trajectories in magnetic fields.
SADC barbecue at Lake Geneva
I received an invitation from the Botswana Embassy in Geneva last week to attend their annual Southern African Development Community (SADC) barbecue in Barton Park on Lake Geneva. The food was wonderful — I was able to taste something from most of the countries that were represented. It was also fun to network with SADC diplomats who happened to be in Geneva this summer. That’s a rare opportunity for students!
This is my last postcard from Geneva. I’d like to encourage STEM students from around the world to apply for future CERN Summer Schools–it’s rewarding! I’m thankful to STEM-Trek and Cray for making it possible for me to attend, and look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with U-Botswana professors and classmates!
Badisa Mosesane
Undergraduate CS student
University of Botswana
Find Badisa’s other postcards from CERN on the STEM-Trek site: (week 1, week 3, week 4).
Many thanks to Cray Computing for supporting Badisa Mosesane’s round-trip flight from Gabarone to Geneva.
