Roger Hockney spent a considerable amount of time at the Laboratory using the SC4020 and later the FR80 in producing various particle simulation animations of which the galaxy evolution and galaxy clustering are particularly remembered.
Roger pioneered the use of particle simulations with the introduction of the Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method for modelling plasmas, galaxies, molecules and the universe. Soon after the arrival of the SC4020, he could be frequently seen viewing his latest film on the Atlas projector. At the time he was the first Professor of Computer Science at Reading University which had a close relationship with the Atlas Laboratory.
Roger already had a deep knowledge of computer systems having worked at English Electric in the DEUCE era on the design of nuclear power stations. He later spent time at IBM Yorktown Heights using their SC4020 before moving to Reading.
In later life he became an authority in the use of parallel computation for demanding simulations.
A major publication was Computer Simulation Using Particles by Roger Hockney and James Eastwood (Culham), in 1988. This 540+ page book includes a section describing his activities using the SC4020. He made the point that it is never wise to compute blindfolded without being able to see what is happening in detail in a simulation. It is essential to be able to examine the orbits of a few of the particles in the simulation to check for errors.
The particle simulations often had 10,000 dots animated on the screen giving a satisfactory dynamic display of the time evolution of the experiment. The film was invaluable in identifying the qualitative features of any instabilities that may not be evident from the examination of static displays taken every 100 time steps.
Film making was expensive so these were limited to being produced whenever a major change was made in scaling or geometry. If not, important physical phenomena or programming errors would go undetected.
Roger Hockney died on the 14 April, 1999 in Oxford having suffered from cancer for the previous three years.