Dr Gavin Pringle

Applications Consultant

g.pringle@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Tel +44 (0)131 650 6709
Fax +44 (0)131 650 6555

I graduated from Napier Polytechnic with BSc Hons(i) in Mathematics with Engineering Technology. I then went on to receive a PhD from Napier University, with Edinburgh University and the University of California at Berkeley as cooperating institutions.

I worked as a post-doc at Napier for 4 years, researching the simulation of turbulent fluid flow over a sphere. Pseudo-particle methods are used, namely Vortex Methods, which removes the problems of meshes. I have parallelised the simulation using my own SPMD many-body fast solver.

Hobbies: I enjoy travelling and the arts, and I play bass in The Decades. Sports include badminton and swimming.

I joined EPCC in April, 1997. Currently, I am involved with the following projects.

  • PRACE: Member of coorindator of the PRACE User Documentation Editorial Panel, and member of the Tier-1 Distributed Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) team
  • AWE: introduced OpenMP to key F90/MPI 2D benchmarking code, Chimaera2.
  • VASP dCSE: profiling with a view to optimising by introducing OpenMP to VASP, a F90/MPI materials/chemistry code.
  • OpenFOAM: Maintaning OpenFOAM on HECToR
  • HPC-Europa: Contact and Host for visitors to EPCC under this transnational Access Visitor Programme.
  • Support: Supporting users on the UK.s national supercomputing service: HECToR computing platforms and on EPCC’s own Sun cluster.

    Past projects

    • OpenFOAM dSCE: installing and benchmarking OpenFOAM on HECToR.
    • AWE: introduced OpenMP to key F90/MPI 3D benchmarking code, Chimaera.
    • SAP-O3: requirements capture and production of SQL database and related php-generated queries for University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy towards a school-wide ‘out-of-office’ tool.
    • UK eScience All Hands, Edinburgh, programme committee and co-organiser and chair of a special session on “HPC Grids”.
    • EPCC booth coordinator for the ISCs in Heidelberg and Dresden.
    • MSc: MSc Supervisor 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2011,
    • MSc: Teaching MPI, MPI-2, HPF and FFTs on our MSc in HPC.
    • MSc: Author and Teaching FFTs on our MSc in HPC.
    • DEISA2:
    • DEISA: Task leader of the Cosmological Applications Joint Research Activity of DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Scientific Applications. This project is attempting to link European supercomputers into one gigantic meta-supercomputer. My work is also funded by VirtU.
    • FireGrid: HPC Consultant, project management and database management
    • HPF: Consultancy, course coordinator and compiler caretaker.
    • Met. Office: Optimisation work on the main weather forcasting code for the TV forecasts.
    • MHD: HPC consultant to the UK MHD Consortium.
    • OCCAM: Incorporating real temperature/salinity data into a world.s oceans simulator.
    • Pepper.s Ghost: Technical Reviewer for a project looking at remote rendering farms for animated movies.
    • PLATO: Parallelising a matrix diagonalistaion in a material science code called PLATO running on HPCx
    • T3E: Supporting users on our T3E system.
    • TRACS: Visitor Contact and Acting Deputy Coordinator.
    • VASP: Profiling and optimising VASP, a code that simulations materials.
    • Virgo: Supporting the portable F90 MPI/MPI-2 AP3M-SPH code. Currently looking to introduce self-tuning.

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