These presentations were carefully crafted and delivered by our industrial partner, AMD. They were designed not only to help hackathon participants prepare for the upcoming event, but also to engage our broader community of HPC users who benefit from training in AMD technologies available through DiRAC.

We would especially like to thank the AMD team for their dedication and efforts in putting together these three highly valuable afternoon sessions.

Bob Robey is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Data Center GPU Software Solutions Group at AMD and is the global training Lead for GPU software. He has an extensive background in modeling compressible fluid dynamics with shock waves. He has led the Parallel Computing Summer Research Internship program at Los Alamos National Laboratory for seven years. He is also a co-author with Yuliana Zamora for book Parallel and High Performance Computing, Manning Publications. He has over thirty years of experience in parallel computing and a decade in GPU computing.

Gina Sitaraman is a Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) Software System Design Engineer in the Data Center GPU Solutions and Performance Analysis group. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has over a decade of experience developing and optimising seismic data processing applications. She spends her time at AMD solving optimisation challenges in scientific applications running on large-scale HPC clusters with AMD Instinct™ GPUs.

Giacomo Capodaglio is a MTS Software Applications Eng. working on developing and delivering trainings on AMD GPU software. He has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Texas Tech University and a Master’s in Energy Engineering from the University of Bologna (Italy). Prior to joining AMD, Giacomo was a Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, working on numerical methods for the ocean and sea ice components of DOE’s climate model E3SM. Besides climate, Giacomo’s work includes urban flooding modeling, uncertainty quantification and probability density estimation, and numerical methods development for nonlocal problems.

Thomas Gibson is a Member of Technical Staff (MTS), Software System Design Engineer in the Data Center GPU Solutions and Performance Analysis group. He obtained his PhD in computational mathematics from Imperial College London, where he specialised in mixed finite element discretisations for numerical weather modeling codes. After completing his PhD in 2020, Thomas continued to work on structure-preserving (“compatible”) finite element methods and multigrid preconditioners for weather applications. He began shifting his research towards accelerating fluid dynamics codes using GPUs and developed high-fidelity/low-dissipation discontinuous Galerkin methods for turbulence and combustion models on GPUs. His current research interests include optimising C, C++, and Fortran GPU applications; iterative solvers and preconditioning; finite element discretisations; and numerical weather prediction applications.

Last modified: Friday, 18 July 2025, 9:52 AM