Patrick Sunter Email & Phone Number

Melbourne, Australia

Starting September 2016, I'm beginning a role working in the Bureau of Meteorology's Extended Hydrological Prediction (EHP) section, designing, developing and bringing into active operation hydrologic modelling systems and tools. The Bureau's experts in this field have developed several existing tools that provide their public seasonal streamflow forecasting service, and I'll be working with the team to extend the scope and capacities of these tools.

Melbourne, Australia

In the mid 2000s I worked on a PhD Research project at the University of Melbourne.Unfortunately, it did not result in the required 80K word written thesis and the awarding of a PhD degree - for a myriad range of reasons, including an over-ambitious scope - a problem I understand is common to many PhD endeavours. Still, it was a good learning experience - and I believe I made a significant contribution to Melbourne's public transport analysis and planning community. This included publishing a public travel time mapping GIS application for the entire Melbourne public transport network - a first for that region, involving co-developing a full GIS network from disparate published sources. My research project was an Action-Research study into the potential of open source GIS and transport network modelling tools and models to improve city scale public transport decision-making. This was connected to a larger research program as part of the Australasian Center for the Governance and Management of Urban Transportation (GAMUT), within the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.

Melbourne, Australia

At the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidature, I've delivered guest lectures in the subjects Sustainable Transport and Public Policy, and Urban Informatics, and developed and led tutorial classes for the Urban Informatics subject. I also provided research assistance for an urban design research project by providing preliminary public transport accessibility analyses.

Melbourne, Australia

In semester 2 2013, I ran one of the tutorial groups in the subject Integrated Transport Planning at RMIT University at postgraduate level. In subsequent years I have assisted with running undergraduate tutorials in this subject.

Melbourne, Australia

Provided software engineering, development, and project management services to computational software projects in partnership with research universities and industry.During this period I was primarily working on two main projects: developing distributed infrastructure to more effectively facilitate distributed access to and processing of high-resolution geospatial satellite data, and developing a toolkit to support improved scientific workflows and testing practices for the Underworld geodynamics modelling application.

Adelaide, South Australia

While completing my Masters degree in Urban and Regional Planning, undertook geospatial analysis and related research work required to support the Carbon Neutral Communities research project, under the supervision of A/Prof Jon Kellett. Primarily this involved quantifying potential solar and wind energy resources in the City of Onkaparinga, South of Adelaide, using the ESRI ArcGIS application.

Monash University, Clayton

During this period I transitioned from a primarily hands-on software engineering role tohaving responsibility for coordinating the teamwork and achieving the milestones of the Victorian Simulation and Modelling node of the commonwealth-funded AuScope research infrastructure project.This involved resource planning, monitoring, and overall responsiblity for development processes and practices for a team of approximately ten software engineers, computational scientists and researchers, as well as liasing with project stakeholders.

Carlton, Victoria, Australia

On my return from Caltech I resumed work on software engineering, design and project coordination on a range scientific modelling projects for VPAC's University-based clients. The primary project application field was in VPAC's long-term partnership with Monash University to develop better software for modelling Earth Systems processes (Underworld), but smaller projects include supporting materials science modelling and simulating biological processes. My engineering work included designing, implementing and testing key sections of the infrastructure code required to support much-larger 3D simulations on massively-parallel computers using the hybrid particle-in-cell and finite element method developed by our project partners at Monash.Our team at VPAC also had a major focus on applying best-practices of software engineering and development to scientific software, such as the application of architectural design patterns, extensive unit and integrated testing, and use of wikis for knowledge sharing, to scientific software development. I led aspects of this work, particularly in training PhD researchers working on aspects of the project the essentials of these techniques.

Pasadena, California

As part of a larger collaboration and expertise-sharing project between the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), I travelled to Pasadena and worked on a project to integrate new capabilities into an open source scientific modelling framework, Pyre. In particular I designed and developed a set of access protocols in Python so that the plotting and map-making capabilities of the popular Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) project could be utilised as part of scientific workflows written with Pyre.During my stay I learnt more advanced techniques in the Python language from the project's lead software architect, especially in the application of design patterns to scientific workflows.

Carlton South, Australia

After completing my software engineering degree I joined VPAC's Computational Software Development (CSD) team. My primary field of work was computational geophysics, as part of the ACcESS (Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator) project funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government. In cooperation with partners at Monash University, our team developed a set of interoperable open source software applications and tools for 3D simulations of geophysics processes able to take advantage of massively-parallel supercomputers. This often involved re-engineering existing legacy codebases, where possible using proven protocols and frameworks such as MPI for enabling parallel processing and the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computing (PETSc) to support solving sparse matrices. In addition to experience with specific tools and libraries, during this time I learnt the supporting skills necessary for developing complex applications to run well on a range of Unix-based HPC systems (ranging from small clusters, NUMA SGI machines through to Australia's peak national facility at the time), as well as the essential practicalities of configuring, maintaining and distributing open source software projects.

Melbourne, Australia

In the final year of my undergraduate degree I was offered a position in the first summer internship program at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, soon after it was founded with the goal of improving Victoria's capacites in scientific computing as a government, research and industry partneship.My project involved working as part of a team on improving an existing tool the visualisation of global plate tectonics processes, called PlatyPlus. During my time on the project we re-designed and began the re-writing of the existing C++ codebase with a client-server architecture to decouple the interface and graphical elements from the underlying numerical processing, and thus support modular replacement to use more modern libraries.

Melbourne, Australia

A second summer-work period with the team developing VET Antivirus and related software products, soon after the company's acquisition by Computer Associates. I worked on improving aspects of their testing framework for several of their antivirus and security products, written in C++.

Melbourne

Worked as part of VET Antivirus Software's technical support team during a summer break in my undergraduate software engineering degree. Fielded phone calls and email support issues for the company's antivirus and security software.

Masters, Urban And Regional Planning

Activities and Societies: OOPS (Organisation of Planning Students) Awarded commendation by UniSA and also the Planning Institute.

Bachelors (Honours), Software Engineering