Peter Kilpatrick
Computer Science
Queen's University Belfast
Contact

Research Interests

I am a member of the High Performance and Distributed Computing research cluster in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast. I have a long-held interest in the pragmatic use of formal specification notations to model and reason about systems, most recently distributed/grid-based systems and, in particular, autonomic aspects of such systems. I am a partner in the EU-funded ParaPhrase Project. Other current interests include variability management, particularly in the context of software product lines and feature modelling; and model-driven engineering. Previously I have worked in the areas of program transformation, formal methods, and language design for parallel systems.
My publications can be found here.

I currently co-supervise three PhD students:
Anthony Keenan: Derivation of distributed implementations from Orc specifications
Stephan Kraft: Performance Modelling for Distributed Systems.
Stephen Murray: Feature Modelling for Parallel Systems.

Teaching

I teach two final-year courses:
"Algorithms: Analysis and Applications" which explores the complexity of a range of classical algorithms including sorting, searching, pattern matching, etc.
"High Performance Computing: Principles Of Parallel Programming" which explores fundamentals of parallel programming and emphasises practical aspects via MPI, OpenMP and CUDA.
Previously I have taught courses on Introductory Programming, Concurrency Theory and Practice, Formal Methods (VDM), Computation Theory, Language Semantics, Human-Computer Interaction.