PhD Studentship: High Performance Computing Micromagnetics

Engineering & the Environment

Location: Highfield Campus

Closing Date:  Wednesday 20 December 2017

Reference: 820716F2

PROJECT REFERENCE: NGCM - 0055

Computational Micromagnetics is a widely used technique to predict and improve the behaviour of magnetic devices, for example in the data storage and sensing industry. Spintronics, Magnonics, and most recently Skyrmions [1] are particular directions of development in nanotechnology research that offer opportunities to replace electronics as the technology that drives computing and can be simulated using micromagnetic models.

As research moves into assembly of logic units and combination of these into larger systems and devices, the need to simulate large-scale magnetic nanostructures becomes more pressing. Scientists have made use of multi-core CPUs in shared memory systems [2] to accelerate single-core computations, and codes have been developed that take advantage of GPUs [3]. These approaches, while great progress, are limited by a number of cores available in a single machine and available RAM on the GPU, respectively, and cannot provide the large system simulations.

In this project, we will develop, evaluate and use simulation software that allows to carry out MPI-based large-scale computation which can run on today’s state of the art High Performance Computing (HPC) systems such as local Linux clusters and national high-end computing hardware, including the UK’s supercomputer Archer [4]. Focus will be on solving the micromagnetic problem using finite differences and optimise scaling behaviour of the code across a large number of cores. Significant effort will go into the development of a scalable computation of the long-range demagnetisation field and its MPI implementation.

We will use modern software engineering approaches such as test-driven development, continuous integration and release the tool as open source to benefit all of the micromagnetic communities in academia and industry (see for example [5] for the wealth of micromagnetic applications).

For this project, we are looking for a computer scientist with interest in science and computational science, or a mathematician/physicist/engineer/… with interest in programming and software engineering, who can work independently and as part of a team.

[1] http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~fangohr/blog/2015-what-is-it-with-these-skyrmions.html

[2] OOMMF, http://math.nist.gov/oommf/

[3] Mumax, http://mumax.github.io

[4] http://archer.ac.uk

[5] OOMMF citations, http://math.nist.gov/oommf/oommf_cites.html

If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Hans Fangohr, Email: Fangohr@soton.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0) 2380 598345

This project is run through participation in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling (http://ngcm.soton.ac.uk). For details of our 4 Year PhD programme, please see http://www.findaphd.com/search/PhDDetails.aspx?CAID=331&LID;=2652

For a details of available projects click here http://www.ngcm.soton.ac.uk/projects/index.html

Further details:

• Job Description and Person Specification