Introduction

My name is Hendrik, I am 24 years old Estonian. I can speak Estonian, English and some programming languages (also have studied Russian for many years but for me programming languages are closer to heart).

Computers have fascinated me since my early childhood. I used to play Commander Keen on my mothers work computer often wondering how the character in the game obeyed all my orders. Specially when it meant the death of the hero.

First PC in our household had windows 95 operating system installed on it. There I learned that if movies do not play, there is typically some sort of mystical codec missing and without the right drivers the computer is just a box of electronics.

Now I am older, have had a lot of experience in electronics, personal computers, robotics and much more. My Bachelor's theses was about AES implementation on FPGA development board. On FPGA boards I first encountered  extensive parallel programming. Encouraged by this I became certain that I wanted to do something with parallel computing as a part of my Master's theses as well.

Another interest and passion I have is videography. With my friends I have made different short films, fun clips and other media for over five years. With creating video media comes also the need for video encoding. This is usually tedious and time consuming process and during the encoding process the computer is more or less unusable.

When I found out that my university has some Nvidia CUDA cards and available nodes I thought that it is a wonderful idea to combine my two passions and create a cluster with Nvidia cards that would relief my computer from the tedious encoding load. This is probably not going to happen as it is the schools hardware but universities have even more videos to encode as the lectures and events are often recorded.

So as my Master's thesis I am designing a CUDA cluster that is capable of video encoding. Future posts will cover the learning experience I have during this project.

A memory from my childhood