I was in the sixth grade when I observed a change in my father’s work process.

The building design

charts, account logs and drawings that used to stock up in my father's office has turned into a white
box which my father called the Computer. Curious to understand how the Computer had a
transformative impact on our lives, I started exploring the things that a computer could do. To pursue
a career in this field, I aligned myself towards applying to top rated programs of the country. My
determination and efforts at high school paved a path to enrol myself in the unique ICT course that
had a lot to do with the applications of computers at the prestigious DA-IICT.

In the initial years at DA-IICT, the lectures and lab sessions of object-oriented programming and
data-structures courses solidified my understanding of the essential fundamentals. Additionally, I
read research articles, publications and projects on computer systems, networks and algorithms.
Excited to take my learnings beyond the academic curriculum, I attended talks by guest lecturers from
Amazon and participated in workshops. At this point, I saw my interests aligning towards tweaking
the performance and security of programs on systems.

To gain a first-hand experience of working on industry level projects in the application of computer
science, I chose to intern at Robocop.i.o in the summer break after my sophomore year. Robocop.i.o
is a software consultancy firm led by experts in cloud computing. As an intern in systems profile, I
worked towards developing plugins for tools such as collectd that had to be installed on the client’s
cloud-machines. These plugins would in-turn provide in-depth analysis of the resource usage and
highlight the areas that required improvement. This task demanded me to be versatile when working
on machines with diverse architectures and configurations. After weeks of exclusive programming
and adapting myself to professional coding conventions, I successfully developed an efficient
industry level code. One of the modules involved optimization of various C programs using the
openMP library to achieve faster execution on the CPU. I was intrigued by the tweaking and
implementing performance enhancing features.

My fifth semester gave me the perfect opportunity to pursue this interest academically and test my
application competence. I studied High-Performance Computing (HPC) as a subject, where-in I got
to implement, compare and analyse optimization strategies on case studies from various scientific
domains. I worked on diverse problems of classical physics, image processing and financial
mathematics and realized that my approach towards developing the solutions would be a perfect fit
towards tackling the challenges of this sub-domain. With a strong foundation of the course, my two
team mates and I participated in the nation-wide parallel programming challenge organised by IEEE
HiPC, 2016 and secured the second runners-up position. Being the only undergraduate team among
industry professionals and researchers, we got the unique opportunity to present our solution in the
form of a student research poster.

With a fulfilling experience at doing something significant in HPC, I decided to take up a data science
project and deduce how performance enhancements worked. It was the sixth semester when I saw the
opportunity to create a prediction model using neural networks and regression that would predict
upcoming movie collection. I prepared a training set of 112 movies with more than 10 features each
through Google trends and other online movie databases. Working with our mentor, my partner and
I extended this computational data science course project to include the data for 5 countries. The
complexity made it challenging to integrate various novel features such as actor significance and area
wise-collection into the existing implementation. To get over this complication, we switched our
entire code-base from traditional python to an R implementation in order to avail latest libraries and
features. Upon competition of the training model, a 70% accuracy was achieved for the test data
which is the highest value for this specific problem. Apart from improved accuracy, this approach
provided deeper insights into the movie production industry process flow and market analysis. Our
work was accepted in the SCESM ’17 conference and later published in the International Journal of
Control Theory and Application. After getting our work reviewed and appreciated by esteemed
personnel, I was able to comprehend the need to continue growing as a researcher and keep myself
on dedicated to working on highly demanding projects.

From here onwards, no halt was affordable to fulfil my aim of working on a project that makes
significant contribution to this community. Studying plasma behaviour using Particle-in-Cell (PIC)
algorithm for 1 ms of physical time required day-long simulations. Parallelization of this algorithm
is one of the top-10 challenges, declared by researchers, and I was more than excited to solve this. To
optimise this simulation on a CPU and reduce the execution time to a few hours, I undertook the
applications of HPC in plasma physics as my research project. With progress on the project, I got to
learn numerous aspects of scientific computing such as visualisations, benchmarking and result
interpretation. I paved my entry into the intensive research area of applications of HPC in scientific
domain and extended the research into my full-time summer internship. After an extensive
background study of parallelization models, unique case studies in plasma physics and publications
we were able to comprehend the computational demand of the simulation. My teammate and I aimed
to develop novel techniques such as self-aware sorting, cache-coherence and hybrid parallelization
models. Programming for three completely different Intel hardware models (Xeon, Phi 5x and Phi
7x) and comparing the results for each parameter was a massive challenge for me. My handwork paid
off when the optimized code performed 20 times faster than the traditional serial version. With myself
as the first author, this work was accepted into the research poster category of the International
Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC’17 -
Supercomputing 2017) at Denver in November ’17. I am also one of the selects of the “experiencing
HPC for undergraduates” program of the SC’17 as a part of which I was provided travel grant for
attending and presenting my contributions to the field as an undergraduate. The positive review of
our work by established researchers applauds the efforts that I had put into it.

Through the academic and hands-on learning opportunities I have strived to develop my skill-set in
HPC. I aspire to be a major contributor to the development of the upcoming super fast and energy
efficient hardware and software. The steeper challenges I undertook highlighted to me the need of
quality education and my interactions with professors and mentors have affirmed my understanding.
The primary motivation to pursue a MS degree in Computer Science is to propagate my understanding
of the field and discover the path to realize my long-term goal. In order to achieve this and to develop
the corresponding skill set in complex software and hardware integrations, it is of utmost importance
to have experience in the technologies of both industrial and research-oriented firms.

The M.S. in Computer Science program at Virginia Tech Institute serves as the perfect fit for
continuing the nourishment of my academic and professional interests. I am looking forward to the
course on Advanced Parallel Computation by Professor Adrian Sandu to XX. His extensive study on
creating efficient and accurate air quality models has stimulated me and being a part of the projects
lead by him will strengthen my aspiration of becoming a leading researcher in study of numerical
simulations in scientific sub-domains. The high-end cluster facility would amplify the effect of the
software optimization and supplement the overall quality of my results. Moreover, workshops such
as the HPC day organised by the Advanced Research Computing division and CS department would
enable me to BB. I have organized networking events and served on various non-academic
committees during my undergrad and I am keen on furthering this at Virgina Tech. The global
reputation of the Institute and the department along with its strong integration with industry has
augmented my desire to join the program.