About Me

First and foremost, I’m father of 3 wonderful children. That is the role in which I take the most joy and get the most benefit. I’m also husband and software developer by heart. When I’m not playing with the kids or building software applications, I like to play basketball.

Regarding my interests, I like and love parallel computing. It started during my diploma thesis, where I speed up a batch process from 4 hours to 20 minutes by recycling database rows and by parallel execution of course. During my time as a PhD student, I smuggled me and three of my students into a parallel computing conference nearby because we could not afford the tickets and because Gustafson (yes the Gustafson from Gustafsons law :-) was the invited speaker. Here the proof, I met him:

Large machines are amazing because you can use them for very very large problem solving tasks. Its great fun to tackle large problem spaces but things get hairy if you must have to debug with 18 000 cores or you have to find memory leaks, which only show themselfs at large core counts.

There is a rule of thumb I heard in several talks.

With each order of magnitude Cores/CPUs you discover a new programming challenge.

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Another thing about me is, that I like pragmatic and simple solutions as well es pragmatic and simple explanations, if possible. Once, I had to heat my hands on a very cold day in a train during my way to work. I quickly wrote a parallel endless loop to keep the CPU hot. The excuse to not write a parallel GPU programm ist, that my fingers where stiff and the CPU solution was simpler to write.

Teaching takes also a large part of my interests. I was fortunate to be responsible to design and execute a HPC lecture during my time as PhD student. During that time I learned a lot about structure and some nice parallel computing libraries like OpenMP and OpenCL. Just recently (2018) I had the opportunity to hold a lecuture for programming beginners at the university of applied sciences in Pforzheim with Java. All the nice OO stuff. It looks very promising, that I can finally teach a lecture about parallel computing at the university of applied sciences in Offenburg this year (2019)

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