About Southampton’s Computational Modelling Group (CMG)#
The Computational Modelling Group brings together researchers, engineers, staff and students from across the University of Southampton working with computer simulation, data analysis, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, and more generally research projects that have software engineering aspects.
The computational modelling group members are united by their research and use of computational methods, and apply these tools to advance our understanding of a wide range of topics such as physical sciences, engineering, medicine, society, economy and management.
In the period from the inception of the group in 2009 to 2024, about 1500 PhD students, research fellows and academics have been group members, and have benefited from the support, networking and training opportunities that the community can provide across a wide range of research domains. In 2024, the community-editable web pages at https://cmg.soton.ac.uk have been retired and now serve as a read-only archive.
Based on that computational community two Centres for Doctoral Training were attracted (Doctoral Training Center Complex Systems and Institute for Complex Systems Simulations, Center for Doctoral Training in Next Generation Computational Modelling) which together trained 118 PhD students in the field. The Research Software Engineering community emerged in parallel, and today many of the former Southampton PhD students from the Computational Modelling Group are working as Research Software Engineers as experts connecting software engineering with scientific research.
The Computational Modelling Group was founded in 2009 by Hans Fangohr with the aim to bring together all research at the university that involves computational methods, research and analysis. Many of the group members are users of the University’s, national and international supercomputers, but significant computational research takes place on more modest hardware, and this activity is explicitly included in the group’s remit.
A key aim of the group was to enable networking between traditionally disjoint faculties and disciplines: often the same computational problem or technique and exists in multiple discplines, but might be known under different names. Computational training needs for PhD students and researchers are similar in different disciplines, and the group tries to streamline this across the university. The group also demonstrates critical mass in computational modelling at Southampton to research councils, industry and other parties.
15 years later, these ambitions have been (at least partly) achieved, computational methods have become the third pillar of science (next to experiment and theory), and are embedded in most research activities – much reducing the need for the networking opportunities the computational modelling group provided.
From 2024 onwards, the home page and contact point for remaining CMG activities is https://computational-modelling-group.github.io/.