Dr Tom Deakin

Please note this website has not been updated since my affiation changed to Graphcore in March 2026.

Dr Tom Deakin is a Staff Engineer at Graphcore. He was previously a Senior Lecturer in Advanced Computer Systems_ (U.S. equiv. Associate Professor) in the School of Computer Science, and Head of the High Performance Computing Research Group, at the University of Bristol. Whilst at the University, his work included researching the performance portability of massively parallel High Performance simulation codes. He developed both the theory and practice of performance portability, exploring parallel programming languages, designing and evaluating proxy applications. Tom has contribututed to a number of open standard programming models, including SYCL, OpenMP, OpenCL and ISO C++. He was the Chair of the Khronos SYCL Working Group 2023-25, and was a member of the ISO WG21 C++ Standards Committee. Tom completed his PhD in Leveraging Many-Core Technology for Deterministic Neutral Particle Transport at Extreme Scale in 2018, and has since continued working on unstructured mesh transport and performance portability on HPC architectures. In 2012, Tom graduated top of his class from the University of Bristol with first class honours with a MSc in Mathematics and Computer Science, winning the prize for Best graduating student in Computer Science and Mathematics. Tom lectured for Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol, and has given tutorials on parallel programming models at international conferences and private courses on OpenCL and OpenMP. His book, co-authored with Tim Mattson (Intel Labs), “Programming Your GPU with OpenMP: Performance Portability for GPUs” was published by MIT Press in November 2023.