1. Faculty of Environment
  2. School of Earth and Environment
  3. People
  4. Profile
Dr Mark Richardson

Dr Mark Richardson

  • Position: Technical Head of Centre for Environmental Modelling And Computation
  • Areas of expertise: Parallel computing; computational fluid dynamics; OpenMP; high performance computing; HPC; numerical modelling; multiphase flows; software engineering; Python; visualization
  • Email: M.G.Richardson@leeds.ac.uk
  • Location: 10.115 School of Earth and Environment
  • Website: Personal homepage | CEMAC | Twitter | Researchgate | ORCID

Profile

July 2016 Technical Head of CEMAC

Day to day management of group tasks. CEMAC is a group within ICAS that provides computational expertise to help environmental researchers prepare simulations, process data from various sensor types, provide tools for data analysis and for displaying research outcome to a wider audience.

Sep 2014 to July 2016 JWCRP NCAS Numerical Analyst

This project addressed the computational efficiency of the aerosol and chemistry components (UKCA) of the UK Met Office Unified model (MetUM). Sep 2017: The OpenMP for the aerosol processes has been lodged on the trunk for vn10.8.

NAG, Manchester, support users of national supercomputer facility HECToR (a Cray XE6). Troubleshooting, training and consultation on HPC software. Also build and install additional software.

CD-adapco, Hammersmith, software build engineer, using many unix systems to build the software library for a comercial CFD product catalogue. Streamlining and extending the production line to cope with system failure during the build process, additional products, variation in target platforms. Supporting the developers. Investigating new hardware, compilers and OS platforms.

Parallel Applications Centre, University of Southampton knowledge transfer of parallel programming from academia to commercial software developers. Many platforms mainly Unix based parallel computing systems.

British Aerospace Military Aircaft Division, Kingston Upon Thames; aerodynamicist, a full range of work initially with Harrier performance analysis/predicition, then Sea Harrier wind tunnel programme then theoretical aerodynamics including parallel computation with transputers and early Cray YMP.

Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering (UMIST, Manchester) 'Investigation of Cavitation in Oil Flowing Through a Venturi'

Created a mathematical model for the response of the radius of a vapour bubble to pressure in the surrounding liquid. Validated the model with measurements from experiments using high speed photography and then incoporated the model into commercial CFD codes, FLUENT and STAR-CD as user coding.

Cray User Group

  • Cray User Group 2016 (London, UK) 'Computational Efficiency of the aerosol scheme in the UK Met Office Unified Model', Mark Richardson, Graham Mann, Fiona O'connor, Paul Selwood
  • Cray User Group 2013 (Nappa, California, USA) 'Improvement of TOMCAT-GLOMAP File Access with User Defined MPI Datatypes', Mark Richardson, NAG, Martyn Chipperfield, UoLeeds.
  • Cray User Group 2010 (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK) 'Combining Open MP and MPI within GLOMAP Mode: An Example of Legacy Software Keeping Pace with Hardware Developments', Mark Richardson, NAG, Graham Mann, UoLeeds.

Four 'DCSE reports' on HECToR

  1. 2008-2009 Parallel efficiency of GLOMAP/TOMCAT on Cray XT4 and Cray X2
  2. 2009-2010 Implement OpenMP parallel regions within GLOMAP/TOMCAT on Cray XT4 and XE6
  3. 2012-2013 Analysing IO performance of TOMCAT on Lustre parallel file system of XE6
  4. 2013-2014 Establishing a strategy for parallel lO of OpenIFS on Cray XE6 systems

Responsibilities

  • Balance workload of CEMAC staff
  • Liaise with scientists during proposal preparation
  • Liaise throughout project to manage and deliver requested work

Research interests

  • Data Visualization
  • Distributed parallel programming
  • Novel computing, such as acceleraters in form of attached GPU, or multi threading with OpenMP (not novel nowadays).
  • Numerical weather and climate prediction
  • Computational fluid dynamics
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

  • PhD, Mechanical Engineering, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
  • Dip, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Imperial College
  • BSc, Aeronautical Engineering, City University, London

Student education

Provide infrastructure for Python training courses.

Research groups and institutes

  • Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science
  • Atmospheric and Cloud Dynamics
  • Atmospheric Chemistry and Aerosols
  • Volcanology
  • Climate Science and Impacts