Wes Armour MPhys PhD

Professor Wes Armour is a Professor of Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford. He is the Associate Head of Department for Research in the Department. He was previously the Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, an interdisciplinary research centre that is part of the Engineering Science Department. He has been awarded over £31M of funding as PI or Co-I for a diverse range of projects, ranging from supercomputing, signal processing, and machine learning to computational fluid dynamics and protein crystallography.

He is the Director and Principal Investigator of JADE and JADE2, an 700-GPU machine that was the first national High Performance Computer facility dedicated to advancing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the UK.

He completed an MPhys degree in Fundamental Particle Physics and Cosmology in 2001, followed by a PhD in Lattice Gauge Theory (the computational theory of the strong nuclear force) in 2004.

He was an early contributor to e-Science, being part of the group that developed GridPP in the early 2000s. He was an early adopter of GPU technology in scientific computing. In 2008, he used early NVIDIA GPGPUs to accelerate conjugate gradient routines used to simulate electron transport in graphene. In 2012, he was a member of a team based at Diamond Light Source that implemented machine learning methods that enabled the merging of multiple crystal data in protein crystallography. Since then, he has introduced the use of GPUs in a range of fields, notably pioneering the use of GPUs for Square Kilometre Array (SKA) data processing.

At the centre of his research is a focus on understanding and improving ways to extract science from data by addressing fundamental challenges in modelling, simulation, and data processing. Drawing on ideas from numerical analysis, signal processing, and machine learning, he and his group have produced technologies that will enable some of the science that SKA will deliver, ahead of its anticipated first light in 2026.

Current research projects range from energy-efficient machine learning and the use of machine learning for signal detection in time-domain radio astronomy to stock price prediction in finance and prime number prediction in cryptography. In the area of infrastructure, along with JADE, his team works on enabling fault-tolerant machine learning through distributed checkpoint-restore for Kubernetes. Along with this, he and his team have produced models for people reidentification in multi-modal CCTV data, along with distillation techniques to reduce the number of parameters within a neural network while maintaining accuracy. He has an interest in optimization techniques for AI models, specifically hybrid approaches that exploit gradient and gradient-free methods. Other significant projects have enabled GPU-accelerated signal processing for next-generation radio telescopes like the GMRT, analytical error corrections for protein crystallography.

• Data Science
• Scientific Computing
• GPU Computing
• Signal Processing
• Modelling and Simulation
• High Performance Computing

• Astro Accelerate - GPU accelerate real-time signal processing for time-domain radio-astronomy
• SKA SDP - the science data processor for the Square Kilometre Array (a next-generation radio telescope);
• ENErGize - Energy Efficient GPU Computing, focusing on tuning and optimisation of GPU libraries and algorithms for energy efficiency
• FUN - Fast GPU Convolutions, focusing on accelerating Fourier Domain convolutions on GPU architectures
• AFAR - Acceleration of AI learning, focusing on the acceleration of CNNs
• APT - AI HPC Intersection. This project investigates the use of AI to either predict best values for characterisations in HPC codes or to increase accuracy in simulation results.

Publications: (see Google Scholar)

2017

Jayanth Chennamangalam, David MacMahon, Jeff Cobb, Aris Karastergiou, Andrew PV Siemion, Kaustubh Rajwade, Wes Armour, Vishal Gajjar, Duncan R Lorimer, Maura A McLaughlin, Dan Werthimer, Christopher Williams. SETIBURST: A Robotic, Commensal, Realtime Multi-Science Backend for the Arecibo Telescope The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 228 (Number 2), (2017)

2016

K Adámek, W Armour. A Real-time Single Pulse Detection Algorithm for GPUs Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems, ADASS XXVI, (2016)

K Adámek, J Novotný, W Armour. A polyphase filter for many-core architectures Astronomy and Computing, Volume 15, (2016)

Kaustubh Rajwade, Jayanth Chennamangalam, Duncan Lorimer, Aris Karastergiou, Dan Werthimer, Andrew Siemion, David MacMahon, Jeff Cobb, Christopher Williams, Wes Armour. Commissioning of ALFABURST: initial tests and results. arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.04389, (2016)

2015

W Armour, S Hands, C Strouthos. Strong Interaction Effects at a Fermi Surface in a Model for Voltage-Biased Bilayer Graphene. Phys. Rev. B 92 (Issue 23), (2015)

S Dimoudi, W Armour. Pulsar Acceleration Searches on the GPU for the Square Kilometre Array. Proceedings for Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXV, (2015)

Jayanth Chennamangalam, Aris Karastergiou, David MacMahon, Wes Armour, Jeff Cobb, Duncan Lorimer, Kaustubh Rajwade, Andrew Siemion, Dan Werthimer, Christopher Williams. ALFABURST: A realtime fast radio burst monitor for the Arecibo telescope. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity, (2015)

Jayanth Chennamangalam, Aris Karastergiou, David MacMahon, Wes Armour, Jeff Cobb, Duncan Lorimer, Kaustubh Rajwade, Andrew Siemion, Dan Werthimer, Christopher Williams. ALFABURST.  WSPC Proceedings, July 2015

A Karastergiou, J Chennamangalam, W Armour, C Williams, B Mort, F Dulwich, S Salvini, A Magro, S Roberts, M Serylak, A Doo, AV Bilous, RP Breton, H Falcke, J-M Grießmeier, JWT Hessels, EF Keane, VI Kondratiev, M Kramer, J Van Leeuwen, A Noutsos, S Osłowski, C Sobey, BW Stappers, P Weltevrede. Limits on Fast Radio Bursts at 145 MHz with ARTEMIS, a real-time software backend. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Volume 452 (Issue 2), (2015)

J Chennamangalam, A Karastergiou, W Armour, C Williams, M Giles. Artemis: A real-time data processing pipeline for the detection of fast transients. Radio Science Conference (URSI AT-RASC), 2015 1st URSI Atlantic, (2015)

S Hands, W Armour, C Strouthos. Graphene as a Lattice Field Theory. 9th International Workshop on Critical Point and Onset of Deconfinement (CPOD 2014), (2015)

2011-2014

J. Foadi, P. Aller, Y. Alguel, A. Cameron, D. Axford, R. L. Owen, W. Armour, D. G. Waterman, S. Iwata and G. Evans. Clustering procedures for the optimal selection of data sets from multiple crystals in macromolecular crystallography. Acta Cryst. D69, 1617-1632 (2013).

Anna J. Warren, Wes Armour, Danny Axford, Mark Basham, Thomas Connolley, David R. Hall, Sam Horrell, Katherine E. McAuley, Vitaliy Mykhaylyk, Armin Wagner and Gwyndaf Evans. Visualization of membrane protein crystals in lipid cubic phase using X-ray imaging. Acta Cryst. D69, 1252–1259 (2013).

Wesley Armour, Simon Hands and Costas Strouthos. Monte Carlo study of strongly interacting degenerate fermions: A model for voltage-biased bilayer graphene. Physical Review D 87, 065010 (2013)

M. Serylak, A. Karastergiou, C. Williams, W. Armour, M. Giles and LOFAR Pulsar Working Group.Observations of transients and pulsars with LOFAR international stations and the ARTEMIS system. Proceedings of IAUS 291 (Neutron Stars and Pulsars: Challenges and Opportunities after 80 years, 2012).

M. Serylak, A. Karastergiou, C. Williams, W. Armour and LOFAR Pulsar Working Group. Observations of transients and pulsars with LOFAR international stations. ASP Conference Series, 466, (Electromagnetic Radiation from Pulsars and Magnetars, 2012).

W. Armour, A. Karastergiou, M. Giles, C. Williams, A. Magro, K. Zagkouris, S. Roberts, S. Salvini, F. Dulwich and B. Mort. A GPU-based survey for millisecond radio transients using ARTEMIS. ASP Conference Series, 461, 33 (ADASS XXI, 2012).

David R Merrifield, Vasuki Ramachandran, Kevin J Roberts, Wesley Armour, Danny Axford, Mark Basham, Thomas Connolley, Gwyndaf Evans, Katherine E McAuley, Robin L Owen and James Sandy. A novel technique combining high-resolution synchrotron x-ray microtomography and x-ray diffraction for characterization of micro particulates Measurement Science and Technology Vol 22, 11 (2011)

Wesley Armour, Simon Hands and Costas Strouthos. Monte Carlo simulation of monolayer graphene at nonzero temperature Physical Review B 84, 075123 (2011)

Wesley Armour, Simon Hands, John B. Kogut, Biagio Lucini, Costas Strouthos and Pavlos Vranas. Magnetic monopole plasma phase in (2+1)d compact quantum electrodynamics with fermionic matter Physical Review D 84, 014502 (2011)

Radio Astronomy, Theoretical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics and Grid Computing publications can be found here.

I currently have places available for research students.