I am applying for sponsorship to attend the ACTS workshop from September 28-30, 2000. At present I have two part time positions at the University of Virginia. The first position is as a post-doctoral researcher within the department of Engineering-Materials Science studying the effects of ion bombardment on the atmosphere of planets. I am developing a parallel C++ code using MPI to study the effects of high energy ions colliding with the atmospheres of planets such as Mars. The code is being developed on a Linux cluster and also an IBM SP2 computer. The code is intended to replace a serial FORTRAN code that takes up to fifteen days to simulate seven million particles for seven hours of real time. At present the code uses only simple collisions between particles, in future I hope to simulate more complex collisions. I am interested in tools to help debug parallel codes, test parallel code performance and optimize C++.

The second position is as computer support to researchers at the University of Virginia within the Information, Technology and Communication division. The job involves helping researchers at the University with any computer problems they may have, my particular interest is in High Performance Computing. I have written a number of web pages for the University on using the IBM SP2, optimizing code and parallel programming using OpenMP. Below is a link to the section of ITC that I work for http://www.itc.virginia.edu/researchers/services.html

Attending the ACTS workshop would be useful both for my own research and in my position as computer support. Below is a list of my publications that relate to my PhD work at Queen's University of Belfast in Theoretical Atomic Physics:

Extreme ultraviolet Ne VII line intensity Ratios in high-temperature laboratory plasmas,

M.McKeown, F.P.Keenan, V.J.Foster-Woods, C.A.Ramsbottom, K.L.Bell and R.H.G. Reid. J. Phys. B, 1998, No.31, 4477

Ne VII emission lines in the Solar EUV Spectrum, M.McKeown, F.P.Keenan, C.A.Ramsbottom, K.L.Bell, R.S.I. Ryans and R.H.G. Reid. SOLAR PHYSICS, 1999, Vol.186, No.1, pp.231-242