Vaughan is the Research Computer Manager in Information Services and supports the provision of technical research services to the research community within Queen’s, specifically the High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities and the research data storage platform. 

Background

With previous roles in industry and at Queen's, first as a Computer Science Lecturer and then in IT support, Vaughan has experience as a former researcher and knowledge of software development including parallel programming, HPC architecture design and implementation, data centre constraints, managing 3rd party contracts, tenders and procurement, building a HPC team, user support and training, working with research groups, AI and machine learning, and research data storage.

Current roles and responsibilities

Currently Vaughan is responsible for the provision of technical research services to the research community within Queen’s, specifically the HPC facilities and the research data storage platform, and supports those using these facilities. The HPC brings in over £10M annually through research grant awards.

Vaughan also helps provide research computing services at the national level through the delivery of the Tier-2 HPC facility, NI-HPC, to the UK research community.

In his current role Vaughan uses specialised equipment including infiniband network switches, high memory compute nodes, Graphic Processing Units, gene sequencers and Petabyte scale storage. He employs knowledge of  parallel programming, AI, HPC cluster services such as scheduling and user management and windows/linux. 

Contribution to specific research initiative or project

Recently Vaughan provided support for the COG-UK consortium work undertaken by Queen's in the detection of Covid-19 variants. The kelvin2 cluster (scalable HPC and Research Data Storage environment) at Queen’s was used to analyse and store sequenced SARS-CoV2 virus samples. The results were uploaded to the national CLIMB server, and resulted in the detection of many common viral lineages.