Contact David Wynne Hughes (D.W.Hughes@leeds.ac.uk) Employer University of Leeds State/Province England (United Kingdom) Title Research Engineer (Full-time) Employment Dates May. 2019 — Mar. 2020 Duration 100% (10 months) Tasks and Duties I provided engineering assistance within the Astro/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics team of the Department of Applied Mathematics. My redeployment was necessary to complete the project started by Dr Mouloud Kessar, who moved overseas.
Duties of my job included the following: Running an existing computational code to solve problems motivated by convection influenced by rotation and stratification, driven by conditions in stellar and planetary interiors;
Producing graphical output from the code and then playing a major role in analysing the results and suggesting future problems to be studied;
Collating and analysing data to inform the direction and progression of the research project;
Supporting research activities, including contributing to research results and outputs and to the generation of independent and original ideas, ensuring a successful programme of investigation;
Modifying an existing code to incorporate additional physical effects, particularly the influence of a magnetic field;
Writing reports, undertaking literature reviews and playing a major part in writing up the results for publication in scientific journals;
Working both independently and as part of a larger team of researchers and stakeholders;
Participating in the research group and presenting research output where appropriate; Representative Projects The entire role was focused on the one project, for which I delivered all tasks and duties for which I was called upon by my supervisor.
Initially I debugged parallel computer code and then executed a campaign of high performance computer simulation of cyclone evolution and dissipation in planetary atmospheres such as the polar vortex. This required me to re-compile the parallel Fortran code at different high performance computer facilities. I found the most productive facility given the legacy of Dr Mouloud Kessar’s calls to code libraries was to migrate to new facilities at the University of Leeds before other users had moved from established facilities. Another aspect of my work was to establish persistent storage as the university facilities’ disk space is cleared every 3 months. Our work was presented by Professor Hughes as “The existence and stability of large-scale vortices in rotating convection” 18 September 2020 at virtual meeting “The Dynamics of Rotating Fluids” with the UK Fluids Network, Oxford University Department of Physics.