Background
He is a mathematician and computer scientist by training with extensive experience in computing research for high energy physics.
He is a mathematician and computer scientist by training with extensive experience in computing research for high energy physics.
In 1972, he started work at CERN, the European Centre for Particle Physics, in Geneva as a fellow continuing his research. He published a paper in 1974 on the numerical solution of a class of equations. To his surprise this recently became useful and is now referenced in a number of papers. He also implemented compilers and assemblers. Techniques in cross compilers and assemblers lead to a machine independent object module format that became an IEEE standard. He gave numerous talks including one in Russia at the Dubna Centre for High Energy Physics (quite unusual in the days of the Iron Curtain).
From 1980 to 1981, he spent a sabbatical period at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where he worked as a consultant on the design of the Bay Area Rapid Transit railway control system and he started his work on the use of relational databases in high energy physics. He also sat on an IEEE standard committee.
On his return to CERN he became project leader of the Personal Computer and Personal Workstation projects within CERN. He was responsible for promoting single user systems into the organisation (seems strange now that almost everyone has a personal computer). He consulted for the University of Geneva on the planning and introduction of their new computing system. The university adopted the recommended distributed computing solution, quite advanced at the time, using ethernet, tcp-ip and SUN Unix workstations.
In 1988, he started studying the use of parallel computers. This interest developed within European Union Esprit projects. He participated and helped initiate the Macrame, Harmony, GPMIMD and GPMIMD-2 Esprit projects making as much use as possible of that great British processor called the transputer which incorporated efficient inter processor communication on the chip. He had a large number of students; I supervised three students from the Technical University of Eindhoven and the University of Geneva and they all successfully obtained their Ph.Ds.
No life at CERN is complete without its committees. he was, for a long time, chairman of the Computer Science Library Committee and represented the computing department on the CERN Scientific Information Policy Board. He was part of the team selecting CERN fellows and associates. He represented the physics department on the CERN Fellows and Associates Committee, was chairman of the Physics Applied Fellows Board and was a member of the Physics Fellows and Associates Selection Committee. He was one of the physics representative on the CERN Applied Fellows Ranking Committee and also represented the physics department on matters concerning the Portuguese and Spanish graduate programmes.
From 1997 until he retired, he became part of the Compact Muon Solenoid, CMS, project which became one the Large Hadron Collider experiments famous for discovering the Higgs particle. He worked on the CMS computing model, databases, Grid (integrated international computing) and continued supervising Ph.D. students from the University of West England , the Computing Training Centre, Islamabad, and the University of Vienna. His main responsibility was for the CMS experiment Offline Software and Computing Project as resource manager on the CMS Finance Board, and for general planning and database management. He became a member of CMS Offline Computing Institution Board working with other world-wide members of CMS. The GRID project became especially effective at utilising international computing resources in particular we could integrate the large computing resources available in the USA. This enabled us to analyse the enormous amount of data produced by our experiment.
He was also the main CMS contact for computing for CMS in Pakistan. This included the National University of Science and Technology, NUST, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the National Centre for Physics. Especially fruitful for computing was the collaboration with Arshad Ali from NUST who provided us with many very bright students.
He is married and has two sons.