Prior to becoming a founder member of EPCC in 1990, Arthur Trew was a Research Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Edinburgh working on simulations of many-body problems. In 1995, he became Director of EPCC; in this role one of his key aims is exploiting computational science linkages between academic disciplines and between academia and industry.
In 2001, he became the Deputy Director of the National e-Science Centre (NeSC); he is also a Director of UOE HPCx Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh, which was formed to manage the £54M HPCx, and more recently the £113M HECToR, projects which provide national High Performance Computing facilities for UK academia.
As the Service Director, he is the main link to the Research Councils for both projects.
Today, he holds a wide range of Research Grants and contracts, and, has published widely on the application of computational science techniques in academic and industrial projects. He holds the Chair of Computational Science at the University of Edinburgh and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Computational Science emerged some 30 years ago as the third research methodology complementing theory and experiment and is of especial use where the system under investigation is too complex to be tractable mathematically, and is not amenable to experiment. Its power has been built on the exponential increase in microprocessor performance but, due to physical limitations, that driver has stopped. This talk will look at the opportunities and challenges enabled by Computational Science and demonstrate the importance of such work for European competitiveness, both academically and commercially.