Dr Andrew Clarke

Profile

I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability between 2021 and 2026, working with Prof. Christopher Davies on the geodynamo. I was the lead developer of the Leeds Spherical Dynamo code throughout that time, implementing features to simulate extra physical processes and delivering performance enhancements to the parallelisation and the spherical harmonic transforms. I also carried out research on geomagnetic polarity reversals.

I completed my PhD in Fluid Dynamics at the University of Leeds, School of Computing. My research was focused on implementing novel numerical algorithms to allow numerical simulation solvers to harness Exascale High-Performance-Computers, my thesis was titled “Parallel-in-time integration of astro- and geo- physical flows; application of Parareal to kinematic dynamos and Rayleigh-Bénard convection”. I published two scientific papers during my PhD, one on Rayleigh Bénard Convection and one on the Kinematic Dynamo.

Responsibilities

• Performance testing and profiling of the Met Office/NERC Cloud model.
• Porting numerical simulation software to GPGPUs.
• Optimisation and development of simulation software in Fortran.

Research interests

I am a Research Software Engineer with a particular interest in:

• algorithm implementation;

• numerical simulation development;

• General Purpose GPU

• fluid dynamics

• magnetohydrodynamics

• high performance computing (HPC) clusters;

• data management and processing;

• numerical modelling of physical systems.

I am familiar with Fortran, Python and C programming languages, and specialize in parallel computing paradigms using Message Passing Interface (MPI) and shared memory parallelism using OpenMP.

Qualifications

• PhD, Fluid Dynamics, University of Leeds
• MSc, Fluid Dynamics, University of Leeds
• BEng, General Engineering, The Open University

Research groups and institutes

• Institute of Geophysics and Tectonics
• Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science