Webinar: The Welsh Supercomputing Program - joint meeting with IET

This lecture will be given by Dr Mark Dawson from Swansea University.

Mark originally from South Wales, Mark studied Physics at Imperial College, London and at Università degli studi di Trento, Italy before following a career as a software engineer. He returned to academia at Swansea University in 2013 to complete doctoral studies in computational mechanics. His research interests are parallelisable, high-order finite element methods, in particular with applications to computational electromagnetics and nanophotonics. Since completing his doctoral studies, Mark has held several positions at the Zienkiewicz Centre for Computational Engineering at Swansea University, developing tools to improve visualisation, performance and user experience of in-house computational fluid dynamics software.

Mark’s talk for the evening will be on the Supercomputing Wales programme, which has had investment by WEFO and is delivered by universities of Swansea, Cardiff, Bangor and Aberystwyth. The programme supports computationally intensive research in Wales. This includes research with an environmental impact not only at Swansea, but also at other partner institutions.

This particular programme doesn't stop at just providing the hardware, but also includes a levels of software and hardware expertise that sets this apart from previous programmes. Rather than "just a machine" there is a team of 14 full-time experts in performance software for research and high-performance numerics, spread across the four institutions. We we’ll see how this level of expertise is rolled out across the programme, finding out what lesson had been learnt from providing such a level of expertise. We will also see what the role of these Research Software Engineers are and how it has impacted research.

Finally, the talk will introduce some their researchers who conduct environmental research. Where a summary of activities across the four institutions will be given. Here will we learn about the two prominent cases, coastal research (Swansea University) and tidal turbine research (Aberystwyth).

This is a joint meeting with the BCS South Wales Branch.