Ian Watson

I am Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at theUniversity of Manchester. I am a member of the DELTA and UFOresearch groups and also Director of the Computer Science Undergraduate School.

Research Interests

My major research interest is in Parallel Computer Systems with particular emphasis on achieving high performance from parallel systems with minimal effort. This implies programming styles which avoid explicit statements concerning parallelism wherever possible. This includes parallel implementations of declarative languages but not to the exclusion of more pragmatic approaches. My expertise is really in machine architecture and run-time systems (for example dynamic load balancing) rather than language design and implementation, although I am convinced that a wide knowledge ranging from programming models through to hardware design is necessary to make progress in the area.

Teaching

I currently teach an Advanced MSc module, CS501 on Implicit Parallelism and part of a third year Undergraduate course, CS301 on Parallel Architecture. I tutor first year groups on basic computer architecture, C programming and ML programming and second year groups on Algorithms. I am also a member of the Faculty of Science Teaching Standards Committee.

Recreational Interests

Contacting me at work