Dirk Pleiter Appointed PDC Director and Professor at KTH

Dirk Pleiter, a long-time employee at JSC, became professor of high-performance computing at the Division of Computational Science and Technology at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in January 2021. He joined JSC in April 2011 and was appointed professor at the University of Regensburg in parallel. At JSC, he has built up a research team on “Application oriented technology development” and in this role he was involved in various European projects, which mostly focussed on co-design of future HPC architectures and technologies, but also closely worked with different computational science communities. He pursued collaborations with HPC solutions providers, e.g. through the NVIDIA Application Lab at Jülich, which helped to prepare applications for systems like the recently installed JUWELS Booster.

In recent years, his focus was on Arm-based technologies through work with different companies including Arm and Huawei. He also played a leading role in projects working on future HPC-based infrastructures, like PPI4HPC, the first joint procurement of HPC systems in Europe, and Fenix, an effort of various European supercomputing centres to create a federated collection of e-infrastructure services. With his appointment at KTH, Dirk Pleiter also became director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing.

JSC is sorry to see Dirk go, but wishes him all the best in his new position.