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Monday, June 4th at 1:30 pm Panelist, Cyberinfrastructure - Are We Ready?  Dr. Hugh Couchman Scientific Director SHARCNET Dr. Hugh Couchman is the Scientific Director of SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network), a $42 million computing consortium of 16 universities and colleges in south central Ontario providing High Performance Computing hardware and facilities. In addition to his role at SHARCNET, Dr. Couchman is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. He completed his undergraduate and graduate work at Cambridge University, receiving his Ph.D. from the Institute of Astronomy in 1986. He spent three years as an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Toronto before moving to the Department of Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario in 1991. He joined the Physics and Astronomy department at McMaster University in 1999, and at the same time became a Fellow in CIAR’s Cosmology and Gravity Program. Dr. Couchman is a theoretical cosmologist who uses numerical simulations to investigate how cosmic structures (galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and superclusters) are built up from small density fluctuations in the pre-galactic gas, beginning roughly 100,000 years after the Big Bang and working forward to the present day, 10 billion years later. New telescopes both in space and on the ground are providing a wealth of new data to constrain these simulations, thus leading to a better understanding of the initial conditions from which these vast structures arose. With students and collaborators, Dr. Couchman uses computers ranging from fast desktop workstations to massively parallel supercomputers to model a range of problems in cosmic structure formation; one of the ”Grand Challenges'' of the computational sciences. Of particular interest is an investigation of the formation of galaxies - frequently dubbed the Holy Grail of contemporary cosmology - and the formation of the first cosmic objects at early epochs in the universe. |
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