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Meet the team

David Smyth, Director NI-HPC

David is Director of the Northern Ireland High-Performance Computing (NI-HPC) Centre, based in Queen's University Belfast, where his focus is on developing the digital research service provision for researchers at a local and national level.

Vaughan Purnell, Research Computing Manager 

Vaughan heads up HPC and Research Data Storage and leads on providing a sustainable and useful service to researchers.

James McGroarty, Research Software Engineer Team Leader 

James is the team lead for the RSE group at NI-HPC. He is responsible for the development and maintenance of Kelvin2 and McClay/RDS research data storage while supporting end users to enable a high-quality service.

Luis Fernández Menchero, Research Software Engineer.

Luis helps the research groups with their software codes. He oversees the installation and maintenance of the scientific applications requested by the different research groups. 

Steven Cousens, Research Software Engineer

Steven provides technical support for users of the high-performance computing and research data storage facilities.

Jazz Urog, Research Software Engineer

Jazz designs, implements, and optimizes large-scale computing systems and applications to achieve maximum performance, scalability, and efficiency for scientific simulations, data analytics, and other computationally intensive workloads.

Dr Brian Cunningham, Research Software Engineer

Brian helps maintain the kelvin2 cluster, assisting research groups with their software requirements and troubleshooting.

Zara Birch, Engagement Officer 

Zara heads up our communications and engagement. She is responsible for promoting NI-HPC internally and externally and for connecting and collaborating with our users, investors and colleagues. 

Jose Sanchez Bornot, Research Software Engineer

Jose works on the NIHPC project assisting users with programming tasks as well as solving general cluster utilization issues. He can provide more technical advice about the parallel implementation of machine learning and statistical analysis.