Director of Technology

Prof. dr. Rob van Nieuwpoort

In May 2012, Rob joined the Netherlands eScience Center. Rob’s current position is Director of Technology. He is responsible for technology development in all projects, project leader of our eScience knowledge development programme, and manager of the Technology Leads. Rob also is a professor in “Efficient computing for eScience” at the University of Amsterdam in the Systems and Network Engineering group of the Informatics Institute.

As Director of Technology at the eScience Center, Rob’s portfolio consists of the following:

• External Research Funding
• Intellectual Property (IP) Policy
• Internships
• Knowledge Development
• Research Software Engineer (RSE) Recruitment
• Software Sustainability and Generalization
• Technology Strategy

Research

Rob investigates novel ways in which large-scale computing power can be used more efficiently in achieving scientific breakthroughs in various scientific fields. His research interests include high performance computing, parallel and distributed algorithms, computer architecture and accelerators, green computing, networks, programming languages, and compiler construction. Rob’s latest research focusses on exascale software infrastructure, and the use of deep learning and accelerators (GPUs) for radio astronomy. He is one of the project leaders of the Efficient Deep Learning (EDL) NWO TTW programme.

Rob received his PhD at VU University Amsterdam in 2003 for work on “Efficient Java-Centric Grid Computing”. Rob has designed and implemented the Ibis, Satin, and JavaGAT systems (now standardized in OGF as SAGA) and worked on the EU GridLab project, and the Dutch Virtual Labs for eScience project. In 2009, Rob started as a researcher at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, where he performed research on radio astronomy algorithms and pipelines for LOFAR and the exascale SKA telescope. In 2011, he became Assistant Professor at VU University Amsterdam, where he taught many-core technology, and initiated the first and only CUDA GPU Teaching Center in the Netherlands. Rob has (co)-authored over 100 refereed publications.

For more information, please visit vannieuwpoort.com.