Professor of Computational Modelling, Head of Computational Modelling Group
Professor Hans Fangohr is Professor of Computational Modelling within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
He is head of the Computational Modelling Group and Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling (www.ngcm.soton.ac.uk).
He received his undergraduate degree "Diplomphysiker" in physics from the University of Hamburg (Germany) and completed his PhD studies in the High Performance Computing Group in Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Hans research interests are the development and use computational methods in a variety of application domains, in particular multi-physics and multi-scale simulations. Software engineering for computational engineering and science, is a key area of interest which motivates and underpins his research and teaching activities.
These computational methods are applied in the research of magnetic and superconducting nanomaterials, systems and devices. His group has released a number of open-source simulation tools, including the micromagnetic simulation environment Nmag.
He researches learning and teaching methods appropriate to education in computational engineering and science, and has been awarded the annual Deputy Vice Chancellor's Teaching Award in 2006, 2010 and 2013 for his continued introduction of innovative teaching methods in undergraduate teaching. He is teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in programming, numerical methods, and effective simulation building and usage.
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Research interests
Hans Fangohr's interests are the development of computer simulation technology, and use of computers and computer simulations to support and advance science and engineering. This covers a wide range of topics, including finding the appropriate model to describe a real system, the mathematical methods to solve the model, the implementation of those mathematical methods and models into software, i.e. the programming, and finally the use of the simulation to actually "do something useful". His interests in improving computational methodology include
Software engineering for computational science, where code needs to be written quickly, needs to be flexible to react to changes in the research direction, and may need to execute extremely fast
Production of software tools that are easy to use by researchers without a computer science background
Development of new multi-physics and multi-scale methods to support the effective simulation of complex phenomena
Automatic code generation to reduce error rates in hand-written codes
Parallel code executing in existing hardware, such as Southampton’s supercomputer Iridis, and emerging hardware such as the Intel Phi and computation carried out on standard PC graphics cards (so called Graphical Processing Units, GPUs).
Rigour and reproducibility in computational science.
He applies the results and insights of this methodology work outlined above to advance understanding in a number of application areas in science and engineering.
A particularly active area of his applied computer-simulation based research is computational micromagnetics. Micromagnetics is the study of literally 'small' magnetic systems. The hard disk used in standard PCs and laptops is an example device based on micromagnetic technology, and computational micromagnetics plays a key role in improving these devices, for example to increase their capacity. Other applied research projects including the simulation of high temperature superconductors, life-time whole system simulation for unmanned areal vehicles to support Coastguard search and rescue, traffic modelling, and simulation of Calcium signaling in biochemical systems.
OpenDreamKit is a Horizon 2020 European Research Infrastructure project (#676541) that runs from September 2015 to August 2019. It will provide substantial resources to the open source computational mathematics ecosystem, and in particular popular tools such as LinBox, MPIR, SageMath, GAP, Pari/GP, LMFDB, Singular, MathHub, and the IPython/Jupyter interactive computing environment.
The project involves about 50 people spread over 15 sites in Europe, with a total budget of about 7.6 million euros. The largest portion of that will be devoted to employing an average of 11 researchers and developers working full time on the project. Additionally, the participants will contribute the equivalent of six other people working full time.
Sahota, P. K., Liu, Y., Skomski, R., Manchanda, P., Zhang, P., Franchin, M., ... Sellmyer, D. J. (2012). Ultrahard magnetic nanostructures. Journal of Applied Physics, 111(7), 07E345. DOI: 10.1063/1.3679453
Woods, C. J., Ng, M. H., Johnston, S., Murdock, S. E., Wu, B., Tai, K., ... Essex, J. W. (2005). Grid computing and biomolecular simulation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 363(1833), 2017-2035. DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2005.1626
Fangohr, H., Beg, M., Bondar, V., Aplin, S., Barty, A., Kuhn, M., ... Kluyver, T. (2017). Data Analysis support in Karabo at European XFEL. Paper presented at ICALEPCS 2017: 16th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, Barcelona, Spain.
Queiroz, F., Brockhauser, S., Silva, R., Miller, J., & Fangohr, H. (2017). Good usability practices in scientific software development. In N. Chue Hong, S. Druskat, R. Haines, C. Jay, D. S. Katz, & S. Sufi (Eds.), Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences : WSSSPE 5.1 (pp. 1-6). WSSSPE. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5331814
Pope, E. C. D., Pavlovski, G., Kaiser, C. R., & Fangohr, H. (2007). Heating rate profiles in galaxy clusters. In H. Böhringer, G. W. Pratt, A. Finoguenov, & P. Schuecker (Eds.), Heating versus Cooling in Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies: Proceedings of the MPA/ESO/MPE/USM Joint Astronomy Conference held in Garching, Germany, 6-11 August 2006 (pp. 251-256). (ESO Astrophysics Symposia; Vol. 2007). Berlin, Germany: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-73484-0_46
Zhukov, A. A., Kiziroglou, M. E., Goncharov, A. V., Boardman, R., Ghanem, M. A., Novosad, V., ... de Groot, P. A. J. (2005). Shape induced anisotropy in hybrid anti-dot arrays from guided self-assembly templates. In Digests of the IEEE International Magnetics Conference, 2005. INTERMAG Asia 2005 (pp. 923-924). USA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Wu, B., Tai, K., Ng, M. H., Johnston, S., Murdock, S., Fangohr, H., ... Cox, S. (2005). Towards a grid-enabled biomolecular simulation database. In Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2005 (pp. 4pp). Swindon, UK: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Wu, B., Tai, K., Murdock, S., Ng, M. H., Johnston, S., Fangohr, H., ... Sansom, M. S. P. (2003). BioSimGrid: a distributed database for biomolecular simulations. In S. J. Cox (Ed.), Proceedings of UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2003 (pp. 8pp). Swindon, UK: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Fangohr, H., Dodgson, M. J. W., Koshelev, A. E., de Groot, P. A. J., & Cox, S. J. (2002). Computer simulation studies of a layered pancake system using the substrate model. Poster session presented at Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference 2002 and the 19th General Conference of the EPS Condensed Matter Division, .
Professor Hans Fangohr Computational Engineering and Design Group Engineering Centre of Excellence Building 176 University of Southampton Boldrewood Campus Burgess Road Southampton SO16 7QF
