ISC General Chair Hans Werner Meuer passed away yesterday at the age of 77. A treasured member of the international supercomputing community, Meuer died peacefully at his home in Daisbach, Southern Germany, after a brief battle with cancer.
Meuer is survived by his wife, Ursula, his sons, Andreas, Martin and Thomas, daughter-in-laws, his grandchildren, his twin sister, nephews and nieces, as well as his friends, colleagues and the entire ISC team.
Meuer has been involved in data processing since 1960. He studied mathematics, physics and politics at the universities of Marburg and Giessen in Germany and in Vienna, Austria, and graduated at the University of Giessen in 1962. In 1972, while working for the Research Center in Jülich, he received his doctorate in applied mathematics from the Rheinisch Research Westfälische Technical University (RWTH) of Aachen. Since 1974, he was professor of mathematics computer science at the University of Mannheim with specialization in software engineering. He was involved in the areas of supercomputing /parallel computing for 33 years.
Meuer’s impressive curriculum vitae includes 11 years, from 1962 – 1973, at the Research Center in Jülich, Germany, followed by 26 years as director of the computing center and professor for computer science at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Since 2000 he was professor emeritus at the University of Mannheim, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.
In 1986, he became co‐founder and organizer of the first Mannheim Super Computer Seminar (which in 2001 became the International Supercomputing Conference – ISC), which has been held annually ever since. Hans Meuer was the Conference General Chair since the very beginning. Since 1998, Meuer was the managing director of Prometeus GmbH, the company that manages all International Super Computing (ISC) events.
In 1993, Hans Meuer started the TOP500 initiative together with Erich Strohmaier (previously at the University of Mannheim, currently at LBNL in Berkeley) and Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee and ORNL). In the TOP500 the most powerful computers in the world are listed – ranked by their best performance on the Linpack Benchmark. The list is updated twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the ISC Conference in Germany in June; the second one is presented in November at the IEEE Supercomputer Conference in the US. The 42nd list was published at SC13 in Denver last November.
In addition to his afore mentioned activities, Hans Meuer has also been editor‐in‐chief of the professional German IT journal PIK – Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation (published by KG Saur Verlag München, Munich), from 1986 – 2004. He is a member of the professional organizations ACM and GI. He has also published numerous articles in the areas of mathematics, data processing and computer science.
In 1999, Hans Meuer became chairman of the governing board of cjt – Systemsoftware AG, Stutensee, Germany, and from 2000 – 2004, he was the chairman of the governing board of SHE Informationstechnologie AG, Ludwigshafen, Germany.
Sons Martin and Thomas Meuer will act as managing directors of Prometeus, the company behind the ISC conference series. The upcoming International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’14) program is complete and has been finalized. The show’s program advisers and the conference steering committee will continue to design future programs.