Mr Adrian Jackson

Director of Research & Senior Research Fellow
+44 (0) 131 650 6470

My research spans high performance computing, data and storage, memory technologies, and application optimisation, helping to ensure large scale computing is efficiently and effectively used. Current and past application domains include computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, nuclear fusion, molecular dynamics, and discrete element modelling. I'm currently the Director of Research for EPCC, and the Co-Director of the MSc in Vision with HPC.

Adrian Jackson

My main areas of research and work are in parallel computing algorithms, parallel programming techniques, new computing hardware, and program/code optimisation. The current focus of my work are a number of research and implementation projects, including:

  • Optimising I/O using non-volatile memory and object storage systems, such DAOS
  • Extreme scale computational imaging for radio astronomy (EIRA) 
  • Adding new I/O functionality, along with wall distance calculation and grid deformation functionality, to the COSA CFD code
  • Supporting extreme scale tidal turbine simulations through the COASTED code
  • Working with Rolls Royce and the Asimov project to enabling coupling of computational fluid dynamics and structural simulations
  • Working with industry to optimise and parallelise simulation applications, and develop data analytics pipelines.

In the past I've worked on things such as:

  • Architect for DLT4NCM, a collaborative project investigating the application of distributed ledger technology to create networked carbon markets and support the Paris climate change agreement. This involves designing and prototyping semi-permissioned distributed ledger technology to enable the networking of multiple separate markets, each a distinct data domain with separate authority and autonomy. To enable carbon markets to innovate the distributed ledger technology also needs to scale and perform, not be a bottleneck to transactions and trading. Therefore, we are undertaking research to enable the design of a transparent and interoperable ledger technology that can scale to a large number of markets, participants, and transactions from the outset.
  • Architect for the EU funded H2020 NEXTGenIO (Grant Agreement no. 671951) project, designing software and hardware solutions for HPC systems using new memory technologies. Focussing on non-volatile memory technologies and their application in computational simulation, data analytics, and machine learning algorithms.
  • EPCC Co-I for the EU funded H2020 DEEP-EST (Grant Agreement no. 754304) project, enabling efficient use of novel modular supercomputing architectures. This includes energy and power modelling for computational simulation, and porting and optimising data analytics applications to the computing environment.
  • Lead (Co-I) for IPCC collaboration with Intel, funded to optimise and port codes to Intel processor hardware, including Xeon Phi and Xeon processors.
  • Co-I for EPSRC software for the future, providing HPC expertise for advanced big data and compressive sensing algorithms.
  • Project manager and technical lead for EPCC on the G8 funded Nu-FuSE fusion exascale project.
  • Project manager and technical lead for EPCC on the EPSRC funded NAIS project.
  • PI for the European FP7 EUFORIA project at Edinburgh and member of the project steering committee
  • User support, code porting, and optimisation work for System Biologists and
    Evolutionary Biologists at the University of Edinburgh.
  • Parallelisation and optimisation of a cardiac simulation package Beatbox, an EPSRC funded software development project
  • Named researcher on EPSRC Plasma Physics HEC Consortia grant (EP/L000237/1).
  • A number of dCSE and eCSE projects, including:

My papers and publications are listed in the Edinburgh Research Explorer

I'm also active in teaching, as Director for the joint MSC in Vision with High Performance Computing hosted at EPCC and Heriot Watt University, and the course organiser for Performance Programming and Machine Learning at Scale at EPCC.

I've been involved in international standardisation activities, such as representing EPCC on the OpenACC technical and marketing committees. Furthermore, I'm also active in reviewing and evaluation, including for a number of EC funding programs and for UKRI.