Mark Basham

SSI fellow

Senior Software Scientist, Diamond Light Source (UK national Synchrotron Facility)

Interests

Processing and visualising large data, Education and outreach, Cluster computing, Python, Java,  Software collaboration, Optimization methods, Agile software development, Github, Twitter, Graphical User interface Design.

Research

My research primarily focuses on using my software skills to help others with their research goals.  At Diamond Light Source this mainly involves the Tomography and Imaging communities, where processing and visualising large scale data is becoming commonplace, and it is becoming increasingly important to have stable and reliable software tools in place.  This work involves writing software to manage the cluster computing resources which are required to process such large quantities of data, as well as writing or providing software to process and visualise the data.  Much of this software is provided by other research groups so it is important to make it all work together with the minimum of fuss, the aim of the game being to make the end user experience as easy as possible, letting them focus on the science.

I work with a team of scientists and engineers who develop the Dawn Science project, a piece of software for visualisation and processing general data, specifically targeting but not exclusive to the synchrotron community.  The key here is that the software is freely available to all users of synchrotron facilities so that they can work on the data that they have collected back at their home institutes.  The software is also open source, which allows collaborators to easily modify and extend the product to deal with any specific file formats, or scientific processing which is required.

I also work with other groups within Diamond where appropriate such as the Insertion Device group, where my experience and contacts within the optimisation community allow for the development of new software to optimize part of the particle accelerator itself.

Check out contributions by and mentions of Mark Basham on www.software.ac.uk