Dr Jon Lockley joins Cardiff University as the new Director of Advanced Research Computing

We are pleased to announce that Dr Jon Lockley has joined the University as Director of Advanced Research Computing. Jon will be working alongside Professor Martyn Guest as he transitions into the role and as Martyn works towards a well-earned retirement.

Dr Jon Lockley, a graduate of Cardiff University, was previously Deputy Chief Information Officer at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) where he was responsible for the development and provision of research computing services at ICR. This included high performance computing, peta-scale storage, scientific software support and development, as well as the interfaces between IT infrastructure and instrumentation. At ICR Jon oversaw the development of Scientific Computing as a service, putting in place a long-term sustainability model reactive to the evolving scientific landscape. Jon has previously held research computing posts at Oxford and Southampton universities.

Jon joins ARCCA at an exciting period of opportunity and change following the recent end of the Supercomputing Wales funded project lifecycle in December 2022, the beginning of new supplier agreements for Hawk and a new partnership with Q Associates and Lenovo to deliver a replacement Hawk compute partition for the LIGO consortium project at Cardiff. Alongside this are future plans to implement an MFA secured HPC service as well as new agile and scalable storage that will benefit Hawk high throughput computing workloads.

Longer-term plans to evolve the centrally provided research computing infrastructure and services at Cardiff are key objectives, alongside developing the case for next generation HPC funding to ensure that Cardiff researchers benefit from improved access to leading-edge technology and support in Wales.