Dr Downes, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematical Sciences and researcher at DCU's National Centre for Plasma Science & Technology, is to speak at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany in June 2010. www.supercomp.de/isc10/

Dr Downes who, with collaborators in DCU, designed and developed a code called HYDRA.  The code will investigate some of the fundamental physics surrounding the formation of stars such as the sun.

“The calculations carried out by this code are incredibly demanding and require massive computational power.  However, it is not easy to make efficient use of the power available in today's biggest supercomputers.  In fact, only a handful of codes worldwide can perform well on the most massive supercomputers where several hundred thousand cores are linked together into one system.  HYDRA has now joined this group of codes”, Dr Downes said.

A full morning during this Conference is being dedicated to the "PRACE (The Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe) Open Dialog with European Tier-0-Users". Dr Downes is the only user to be invited to share his experience of using the PRACE infrastructure at this event.

Dr Downes presented a paper on "Molecular cloud turbulence" at IBM's "Blue Gene Consortium" at the 21st International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking Storage Analysis (SC09), held in Portland Oregon in November 2009.  This Conference is recognised globally as the premier international conference on High Performance Computing, networking, storage and analysis. (http://sc09.supercomputing.org/)