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Youssef Moawad


PhD Student at University of Glasgow
researching and simulating Quantum Circuits

  Glasgow, UK

Hello, cosmos!

I am reaching the end of the third year of my PhD course at the University of Glasgow. I am currently working on my thesis on FPGA-based acceleration of Quantum Computing simulators. My research mainly focuses on simulation using the full-state vector approach with the goal of developing customisable power-efficient architectures for quantum circuit simulation.

My research has several facets, including the development of a quantum circuit specification, verification, and compilation toolchain, the development and evaluation of several quantum circuit simulation algorithms for FPGAs, and evaluation of energy consumption compared to traditional accelerators such as GPUs. Currently, the toolchain is available as open-source on GitHub.

Earlier this month, the first manuscript authored by myself and my supervisors was accepted to the Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering journal, titled Investigating Hardware Acceleration for Simulation of CFD Quantum Circuits.

During my undergraduate years, I maintained a blog on this website, which I have been neglecting since. As it turns out, there's a lot of writing involved in a PhD, so I did not feel like writing more in my spare time. That said, I would like to get back to occasionally posting new articles and tutorials on this website eventually. I have no short term plans to do so at the moment, but it is definitely on the medium to long-term agenda.

Posted on 15/08/2022

After a very anxious wait following my update below, my degree results were published a couple of weeks ago and I'm very glad to write that I achieved a First Class degree. Most importantly, this means I have met the conditions to start my PhD programme in October.

I have now started my internship at MathWorks which will continue until early September.

Currently, my side projects include p5.js simulations of Newtonian physics, building a functional yet minimal browser startpage, and looking into FPGAs in preparation for my PhD.

I also recently put up a new, special, section on the blog, called Shorts, where I'll be posting shorter, more frequent, updates. It has a rolling blog page so all shorts can just be scrolled through. I'll be putting up an index once there's a substantial amount of posts on there.

Posted on 18/06/2019

I just finished my fourth year at the University of Glasgow studying a BSc in Computing Science and Physics, awaiting final results before graduation in June. Having just finished exams, I am now looking to get back into blogging. Potential topics which interest me right now include: quantum computing, parallel computing, perturbation theory, and writing a physics-engine. I recently refurbished this website with a new theme and colour palette.

My final year project was about accelerating quantum computing simulators, which was an excellent fit for me, being a joint honours student. Most of the acceleration work was accomplished with OpenMP parallelisation and by developing optimisations to the simulator allowing it to take advantage of parallelisation. My interest in quantum computing and parallel and distributed technologies grew massively while undertaking this project. And so, if all goes well, I will be starting a PhD programme at Glasgow University to re quantum computing simulators.

I am starting a summer internship at Mathworks in about three weeks.

Posted on 26/05/2019

Early years

From a young age, I always had an interest in computers and technology. The first time I used a computer was when I was 2. My interest in programming sparked when I was 6 years old playing video games when I started to wonder about how these games work. I even started to draw sketches and mind maps about games I'd build on my own if I could! I read my first programming article when I was 7 and I still remember it to this day. My first encounter with programming was when I started learning C# at 9. I am now fluent in many programming languages.

I quickly became very passionate about programming, app development and software. My ultimate goal was to change the world, if even a little bit, by creating software that helps people.

App development

I started learning iOS app development when I was 14 and released my first app to the Apple App Store by 15. Over the following years leading up to university, I worked on and published mutiple iOS apps, detailed on my projects page. Here are some recent apps I worked on:

Images from projects I'm working on. The first, Matrix Master 2, is on the App Store. And the second, The Standard Model, is a work in progress.

Languages and Technologies

Here are some of the technologies with which I have experience:

C/C++
OpenCL
CUDA
Verilog/VHDL
Swift
Objective-C
Cocoa Touch
Rust
OpenMP
Java
HTML/CSS
Javascript/ES6
Node.js
TypeScript
React
React Native
Processing/p5.js
Linux
Git
Python
Django
PHP
Apache
MySQL
Bash
C#

Recent Blog Posts

A Mnemonic to Remember the Maxwell Relations

Date Posted: 16/06/2018

A Brief Post

Welcome back to another post about the Maxwell Relations. This will be a brief post where I will present a very useful mnemonic for remembering the Maxwell Relations that certainly proved quite helpful during my studies of thermodynamics.

This post follows directly (but will be much less mathematical) from Read more

Digital Circuits I: Introduction

Date Posted: 14/06/2018

Welcome to a new series!

Over the past few weeks, I developed an interest in studying digital circuits, and so I thought it would be interesting to write about this topic while learning about it. I first came across digital circuits, in the context of computing science, in a systems course in first year Computing at university. We covered very simple topics and didn't really drill... Read more

Waves VI: Standing Waves Solution

Date Posted: 06/06/2018

Welcome back to Waves!

I've not put up a post about waves in a while, but I'm back to writing and have a few more posts in this series planned for the next few weeks! If you're new to the series, feel free to start at Waves I, which discusses the wave equation.

This part will not be following on directly from Read more

WWDC 2018 Keynote: My takes on everything announced

Date Posted: 05/06/2018

What is WWDC?

WWDC is Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. It's an annual event that brings together Apple Developers from all over the world.

It's where all the new Apple software gets announced every year, and that's, of course, a very exciting time!

In this post, I'll cover everything announced during the keynote presentation,... Read more

Thermodynamics: Deriving the Maxwell Relations

Date Posted: 02/06/2018

Intro and Welcome back to the physics blog!

It has been a good bit of time since I posted the prelude article to this, so it's about time I write this! Welcome back!!

In this blog, I will be deriving Maxwell's relations of thermodynamic potentials. These are a set of relations which are useful because they allow us to change certain quantities, which are often hard to... Read more