Dr. Mark Wilkinson is the Project Director at DiRAC.
In this video from the Swiss HPC Conference, Mark Wilkinson presents: 40 Powers of 10 – Simulating the Universe with the DiRAC HPC Facility.
DiRAC is the integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modeling and HPC-based research in particle physics, and astrophysics, cosmology, and nuclear physics, all areas in which the UK is world-leading. DiRAC provides a variety of compute resources, matching machine architecture to the algorithm design and requirements of the research problems to be solved. As a single federated Facility, DiRAC allows more effective and efficient use of computing resources, supporting the delivery of the science programs across the STFC research communities. It provides a common training and consultation framework and, crucially, provides critical mass and a coordinating structure for both small- and large-scale cross-discipline science projects, the technical support needed to run and develop a distributed HPC service, and a pool of expertise to support knowledge transfer and industrial partnership projects. The on-going development and sharing of best-practice for the delivery of productive, national HPC services with DiRAC enables STFC researchers to produce world-leading science across the entire STFC science theory program.
Dr. Mark Wilkinson is the Project Director at DiRAC. He obtained his BA and MSc in Theoretical Physics at Trinity College Dublin and a DPhil in Theoretical Astronomy at the University of Oxford. Between 2000 and 2006, he was a post-doc at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. He subsequently moved to the University of Leicester to take up a Royal Society University Research Fellow. I am currently a Reader in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group of the Dept. of Physics & Astronomy.
