Thomas M.

While working at Feral Interactive I was lead developer of the macOS port of Mad Max from receiving the original C++ 11 source code targeting Windows/DirectX through to the final release over the course of 1 year. For ∼9 months I worked alone, and for the remaining time additional developers joined me to work on a Linux port and bring the game to release quality. Some of my contributions were: * making the project compile and run in Xcode (and its version of Clang) * adding missing features to in-house implementations of Windows/DirectX/other third party APIs using macOS/OpenGL/OpenCL APIs and more * debugging/fixing initial major issues (spanning functional, graphical, and performance issues) such that the game was playable before putting it through several cycles of QA * performance optimisations to reach the widest possible range of target hardware The project successfully met QA requirements and released in October 2016.

While working at Graphcore, I created an optimised implementation of top-k & sort based on the bitonic sorting algorithm over the course of 7-8 weeks. I adapted bitonic sort to implement top-k, and to the distributed memory architecture of Graphcore’s IPU. I wrote kernels to run on individual processors using C++17 & assembly (custom ISA) with coordinating code in C++ 17. The top-k operation in a key target application for the new implementation was ∼48x faster than with the previous heap-sort based implementation, resulting in the application as a whole running ∼2x faster. This implementation continues to be used today in a wide range of applications.