Dr Turlough Downes, Principal Investigator in the National Centre for Plasma Science and Technology (NCPST) based at DCU, has been seconded to work in the prestigious BlueGene facilities at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS).  The prestigious BlueGene facilities were recently launched by the Tánaiste, Mary Hanafin, by DIAS and the Irish Centre for High End Computing.

The process of gaining access to these systems involves rigorous international peer review of the proposed work and Dr Downes is only the third researcher to be granted access to these systems.

Dr Downes will use the supercomputers to study turbulence in molecular clouds in our galaxy.  This turbulence plays a significant role in how stars such as our own sun form.  Dr Downes will be using a world-leading computer code using novel algorithms developed by him and Dr Stephen O'Sullivan (DCU/NCPST).

Dr Turlough Downes has also been granted access to large-scale supercomputing facilities belonging to IBM in their centre in Rochester, USA.  This access is for the purposes of gaining a deeper understanding of the behaviour of gas and dust in our galaxy, particularly with reference to how this gas and dust ultimately forms stars such as our own sun.  Initially the access will be to a system with 8192 cores, but this will be upgraded in January 2009 to one with 16384 cores.  Dr Downes and one other Irish researcher have been granted this access as a result of their work on the ICHEC-owned Blue Gene systems.