By: TOP500 Team
In November 2014, Bernd Mohr was announced as the general chair for the SC17 conference, marking the first time that someone from outside the United States was selected as conference chair. Mohr attended his first SC conference more than 20 years ago and has held a number of positions on the SC planning committee over the years. He is also internationally known for his work as a performance analyst for HPC systems and has given invited talks at conferences and workshops around the globe.
He is currently responsible for user support and training in regard to performance tools at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany. Mohr started to design and develop tools for performance analysis of parallel programs as a graduate student at the University of Erlangen in Germany, and continued this in his Ph.D. work, which he finished in 1992. During a three year postdoc position at the University of Oregon, he designed and implemented the original TAU performance analysis framework.
In 1996, he joined the Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany's largest multidisciplinary research center and home of one of Europe's most powerful HPC systems, a 28-rack BlueGene/Q. In addition to leading several projects at Jülich aimed at improving system performance, including the Scalasca toolset effort, he is an active member in the International Exascale Software Project (IESP/BDEC) and work package leader in the European (EESI2) and Jülich (EIC, ECL) exascale efforts. He is the author of several dozen conference and journal articles about performance analysis and tuning of parallel programs.
Looking ahead to the task of organizing SC17, Mohr said he intends to combine his work in performance analysis with the well-known German focus on efficiency. Now five months into this role, Mohr took time to answer 10 questions from the SC15 Communications Committee about his experiences, expectations and ideas as he looks ahead to chairing a conference that will draw more than 10,000 attendees from all around the world.
Read the interview with Bernd Mohr on the Official SC15 Blog.