Dr Christopher Maynard
Chris works on improving the performance of scientific software.
Areas of expertise
- Scientific programming
- Parallel programming and optimisation
- Numerical algorithms
Current activities
Chris is a member of the High Performance Computing Optimisation team. His work includes:
- Optimising the performance of the UM, in particular the Even Newer Dynamics for General atmospheric modelling of the environment (ENDGame)
- Designing and implementing the software for the Next generation atmospheric dynamical core for weather and climate modelling
- Porting and optimising models to run on new computer architectures
Career background
Chris joined the Met Office in 2012. He began his scientific career with a degree in theoretical physics from Queen Mary and Westfield college, University of London and then completed his PhD in theoretical particle physics in 1998 at the University of Edinburgh. He held a PPARC personal fellowship, followed by post-doctoral research positions with the theoretical physics group. In 2005 he joined the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) where he developed and optimised software for a range of scientific disciplines and taught parallel numerical algorithms as part of the HPC MSc. He has optimised science codes on diverse computer architectures such as Cray T3D, T3E, XT4/5, XE6 and XC30/XC40 machines, IBM power series, QCDOC and IBM Blue Gene series machines, AMD and Intel CPUs, NVidia GPUs, the Sony Cell processor and Intel Xeon Phi co-processor.