Since I’ve been put in the position of some responsibility here within Research IT Services at UCL, I’ve decided that it’s sensible to start having a public, semi-professional blog where I can talk about some of the things that we (or more specifically me) are doing here at UCL to enable our researchers to use computers to generate science, as well as posting long form about various things vaguely or not at all related. I’ve had a twitter account for a while, but UCL doesn’t really have a recommended blogging platform for individual staff, so a colleague suggested I try using Jekyll with Github pages and so here we are.

Now Jekyll is a tool that comes with very little default styling, so of a course I am having to do everything from scratch, and so this place looks like a bit of a mess while I sort things out (I haven’t really touched CSS in about ten years). I’ve got a test page over here which will be constantly filled with gibberish related to whatever I’m working.

So who am I?

Well I am the Research Computing Applications and Support team leader at UCL, which means I am in charge of the team that looks after users and applications on the Research Computing (HPC/HTC) services at UCL. We are also responsible for a lot of design work and creating the user facing parts of the software stack on these resources. I have a BSc in Computational Physics from Edinburgh, a masters in HPC from EPCC in Edinburgh and a PhD in Chemistry from UCL.

I have particular expertise in Fortran/MPI programming and molecular dynamics, Linux and scripting.

Outside of work I like playing fretted musical instruments (guitar, mandolin, banjo), playing video games (e.g. Guild Wars 2), collecting weird toys (usually Lego, sci-fi or old car related) and tinkering with ancient computers. I have a strong interest in computer history and am a massive fan of the CGI Star Wars Clone Wars and Rebels series, country music, rock and metal. I’m interested in weird, preferably obsolete, programming languages.

If you are at UCL and want to use our HPC services, give me a shout.