PhD Studentship: High Performance Computing Micromagnetics

Engineering & the Environment

Location: Highfield Campus

Closing Date:  Friday 18 May 2018

Reference: 872917F2

Project Reference: NGCM-115

Computational nanomagnetism is a widely used technique to predict, design, and optimize the behaviour of magnetic devices, for example in the data storage and sensing industry. Spintronics, Magnonics, and most fashionably Skyrmions 1 are particular directions of development in modern nanotechnology research that can be simulated using micromagnetic models and atomistic spin 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.

In this project, we will develop, evaluate and use simulation software that allows carrying out large-scale parallel computation, which can run on today’s state of the art High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster systems. Focus will be on solving magnetic problems related to understanding the creation and manipulation of magnetic structures for nanodevice design, and on optimising HPC scaling behaviour of the developed code across a large number of cores using the MPI framework. We will use modern software engineering approaches such as test-driven development, and continuous integration and develop a tool to advance the state-of-the-art simulation technology towards enabling large-scale simulation of fully functional nanodevices. This will also allow us to support and accelerate experimental and theoretical research of our national and international collaborators, and of the wider micromagnetic communities in academia and industry (see for example 2 for the wealth of micromagnetic applications)

We are looking for an applicant with a background in physics, engineering, mathematics, or computer science, and an appetite to learn and research across conventional discipline boundaries. The stipend is at the standard EPSRC levels. More details on facilities and computing equipment are available http://ngcm.soton.ac.uk/facilities.html

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

2 OOMMF citations, http://math.nist.gov/oommf/oommf_cites.html

If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Ondrej Hovorka, (O.Hovorka@soton.ac.uk) or Hans Fangohr (Fangohr@soton.ac.uk).

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

To apply, please use the following website: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/postgraduate/research_degrees/apply.page

Further details:

• Job Description and Person Specification