Hentri Ball - Biography#

Henri Bal heads a group with over 20 researchers on High Performance Distributed Computing. His work focuses on underlying fundamental problems in combination with real-world applications. His group produced programming environments such as the Orca language (for cluster computers), MagPIe (for multi-clusters), Manta (for grids) and Ibis/JavaGAT (for hybrid and mobile systems).

Bal set up an excellent research infrastructure for Dutch computer scientists, through the NWO DAS project, which has a profound impact on Dutch and international computer science research. It has resulted in four generations of distributed testbeds, which have been used by about 100 Ph.D.-candidates in numerous award-winning projects.

He was adjunct director of the Virtual Lab for e-Science project (2004-2009). VL-e was a 40 MEURO Dutch national e-Science project, which also stimulated the establishment in 2011 of the Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC). His team participated in numerous EU projects (e.g., Gridlab, XtreemOS, Contrail).

His current research focuses on both applications and systems. He works on several parallel and distributed applications in computer science. Examples include large-scale distributed reasoning over semantic web data, and distributed model checking. In addition, he studies several real-world scientific applications, with researchers in high-energy physics (NIKHEF), astronomy (LOFAR) and climate modeling (Utrecht University). His current research on systems covers programming environments for modern distributed systems, including GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and distributed smartphone systems.

PhD in Computer Science from VU University (1989) and MSc in Mathematics from Delft University of Technology (1982).

Chairman of the Science committee of the Department of Computer Science and former member of the board of the Faculty of Sciences.