Dr. Michael Browne

Dr. Michael Browne
PhD
Computational Scientist
E-mail:
Tel: +353 91 495947

Michael leads user support within ICHEC coordinating helpdesk and consortium support activities. Michael's direct support work involves ICHEC's engineering community primarily on issues of integrating HPC methodologies with 3rd party "workstation class" technical codes, which recently resulted in a co-authored publication (Stops et al. 2009) with a team of researchers in the field of biomechanics. This builds on past industrial experience as a Digital Design Engineer and his PhD and post-doctoral work with NUI, Galway and the Lund Observatory, where he worked on next-generation telescope simulation (Browne et al. 2006).

The growing importance of world class HPC to Irish researchers has seen Michael focus on providing assistance to a number of research groups which are actively pursuing access to the some of the world's fastest HPC systems. This is a very competative field and encompasses European programmes run by PRACE and DEISA and in the US programmes such as the Argonne Early Science Program and the Dept. of Energy INCITE programme.

Within PRACE, Michael frequently represents Ireland's interests. In 2009, ICHEC backed 5 projects all of which secured access to PRACE resources and Michael works closely with two of those projects on the requisite scaling and porting. One of these projects, using an astrophysics code, attained near linear scaling across ~295,000 cores on Europe's largest supercomputer, a remarkably rare result.

Fig. 1. Michael's work with Dr. Turlough Downes on extracting maximum performance from the extremely large JUGENE system. The screenshot is of the the queue monitoring package llview showing one of Dr. Downes' job running on all 294,912 cores of the system.

In previous work, Michael has gone back to the basics of his undergraduate Computer Science & Physics training to assist with alternative approaches and algorithms to address basic linear algebra problems impeded by the scales at which they needed to be performed.

Publications & Proceedings

A prediction of cell differentiation and proliferation within a collagen-glycosaminoglycan scaffold subjected to mechanical strain and perfusive fluid flow. AJF Stops, KB Heraty, M Browne, FJ O’Brien, PE McHugh.Journal of Biomechanics, vol. 43, pp. 618-626. [link]

Optimised external computation for the Euro50 MATLAB based integrated model. M. T. Browne, A. Enmark, T. E. Andersen, A. Shearer. SPIE Proceedings of Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation: Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy II, 6271, June 2006.

From Euro50 toward a European ELT. Arne Ardeberg, Torben Andersen, Jacques Beckers, Michael Browne, Anita Enmark, Per Knutsson, Mette Owner-Petersen. SPIE Proceedings of Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation: Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes, 6267, June 2006

Implementing an astronomical data analysis pipeline on a grid-type infrastructure. S. O’Tuairisg, M. Browne, J. Cunniffe, A. Shearer, J. Morrison, and K. Power. WebCom-G: ASP Conf. Ser. Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS), XIV, 2005.

Parallelization of MATLAB for euro50 integrated modelling. Michael Browne, Torben Andersen, Anita Enmark, Dan Moraru, and Andrew Shearer. SPIE Proceedings of Modeling and Systems Engineering for Astronomy, 5497:604–610, 2004.