Ms. Nicola McDonnell

Nicola is seconded from EPCC, University of Edinburgh for 6 months form October, 2009 until April, 2010. During her stay she will work on optimisation of WRF community Weather model using GPGPU units. She also is Project Manager for two ICHEC internal projects: for BioInf Portal, which developed a Life Sciences portal to showcase Irish Life Sciences application to an international community, and the User Management System, which is ICHEC Project and User management system.

Nicola joined EPCC, University of Edinburgh in May 2006. She worked on many middleware projects supporting UK and European Scientists, including: GridSAFE project developing a software framework to support accounting, reporting and usage monitoring, and resource management on advanced computing facilities. She also lead two work-packages in BEinGRID Project to develop demo material that shows the business benefits of using Grid technology to industry; the DEISA project, which deploys and operates a distributed European supercomputing Grid; the OGSA-DAI project which develops Globus-based data management middleware; and the OMII-Europe project who developed components that enable interoperability between the UNICORE, gLite and Globus Grid platforms.

Prior to joining EPCC, Nicola studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, specialising in Chemistry. After a brief spell as a Marketing Assistant she returned to college to complete an MSc in Computer Science at Queens University Belfast. Since then she has worked in industry on a varying array of technologies from middleware to device drivers. She went to Scotland in 2002 to study Computer Games Development at Abertay University. This led her to her recent post at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh where she employed her 3D graphics and computational geometry experience to developed 3D Brain Atlas for Neurologists.