John Ferguson

Background

About John Ferguson

Hi there, my name is John Ferguson and I am a software engineer based in London. I have over 6 years of experience in C/C++ software development in scientific and engineering software. My work to date has been in two main areas. The first area is my work at Siemens, where I develop data structures and algorithms to solve problems in computational geometry and solid-modelling which arise in Parasolid. Parasolid is the industry-leading 3D solid modelling kernel and is primarily written in C. I also work on the PVX toolkit, which is a C++ library for constructing Parasolid parts from voxel data. Typically, this is the final step of a topology optimisation workflow where the solution field from a physics solver (usually solid mechanics) is fed into PVX which will generate the geometry of the optimum design. The second area is my academic work in computational physics. My primary language for this was C++. It was during this time that I first learned how to write high-performance code. This was also where I first learned parallel programming and how to design parallel algorithms. At a higher level, my academic research was where I learned how to look at a physical problem, derive a mathematical model and solve it numerically.