NERC Doctoral Landscape Awards in Exascale Computing for Earth, Environmental, and Sustainability Solutions (ExaGEO DLA)

With around 20 PhD students, EPCC has a tightly-knit cohort of doctoral students who are researching a wide range of topics from novel architectures and compilers to machine learning and AI. 

Given the demand for these skills in the wider world, our students have excellent opportunities both for internships and collaborations during their study and employment afterwards. Indeed, in addition to working as staff at EPCC, our PhD graduates have also found employment at a range of organisations including Nvidia, ECMWF, and financial services.

Grand challenges

Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) are a very effective way for PhD students to work on problems with a wider, real-world, impact. The ExaGeo CDT brings geosciences together with exascale supercomputing to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in Earth and environmental sciences. By leveraging a mixture of computational engineering, computer science and statistics, the CDT equips students with the skills and knowledge to help address one of the major grand challenges that we face as society today.

The purpose of ExaGEO is to bring together experts from EPCC, the University of Glasgow and Lancaster University who then supervise students across a range of topics that will impact Earth, environmental, and sustainability solutions. At EPCC we focus on leveraging our expertise in exascale supercomputing and host several CDT students across a range of topics. 

Each student will work under expert supervision and be positioned within a supervisory team consisting of multidisciplinary supervisors: one computational, one domain expert, and one from an Earth or environmental, and/or social science research background. This ‘team-based’ supervisory approach is designed to enhance multidisciplinary training and provide a wider exposure to how research can then translate to real-world results. 

ExaGeo at EPCC

Applications are currently open with a deadline of 9th January, and we list projects with an EPCC supervisor below. For full details about each project and the application process, see the ExaGeo website.

Projects co-supervised by Mark Bull:

• Modelling threatened biodiversity at national, continental and planetary scales.
• Developing large-scale hydrodynamic flood forecasting models for exascale GPU systems.
• Development of landscape evolution models and monitoring in anthropogenically influenced tropical regions.
• Statistical Emulation Development for Landscape Evolution Models.

Project co-supervised by Adrian Jackson and Evgenij Belikov:

• High-fidelity exascale-enabled infrastructure for analysing the impact of wind farm wakes on wind/sea interactions.

Projects co-supervised by Dave Mackay:

• Forests in the Exascale Era: High-resolution Modelling of Global Biomass Drivers, Loss and Recovery.
• Antarctic Ice Loss in High Definition: Analysing novel high-resolution satellite data streams for quantifying 21st century change.

Project co-supervised by Joe O' Connor:

• High-resolution nowcasting of wind speed and power generation.

Project co-supervised by Luca Parisi:

• Chasing fluid pathways: GPU-enabled multiscale subduction models to unravel how subduction driven melt dynamics determine surface deformation and topography.

Project co-supervised by Kirsty Pringle:

• Sufficiency and Carbon Efficiency of exascale computing for environmental modelling and AI.

Projects co-supervised by Kevin Stratford:

• Towards exa-scale simulations of slabs, core-mantle heterogeneities and the geodynamo
• When Mountains Meet the Sea: Simulating Landslide-Generated Tsunamis.

Project co-supervised by Michèle Weiland:

• Mixed-precision multigrid for weather and climate applications.

Links

ExaGeo website
PhD study at EPCC