Henri Elle Bal is a professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Education
Bal received his engineer"s degree from the in mathematics cum laude in 1982. Shortly after graduating, he moved to the Vrije Universiteit where he began doing research on optimizing compilers in the Computer Systems group under the direction of Professor Andrew Tanenbaum. This work was so promising that Tanenbaum encouraged Bal to become a Doctor of Philosophy student in his group.
Bal"s Doctor of Philosophy research led to the development of the Orca programming language, one of the first programming languages intended for large-scale cluster computers.
Unlike most other parallel programming languages, Orca is based on the shared-data object model, which allows a group of computers to have the illusion that they share data objects in a common memory. Programs can operate on these objects as though they were local, even though the only copy may be stored on a different machine.
The run-time system maintains this illusion by replicating data automatically as needed and maintaining consistency between the copies. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis, under Tanenbaum"s supervision, was sufficiently influential that it was later published by Prentice-Hall as a book entitled Programming Distributed Systems.
Career
He is a well-known researcher in computer systems with a specialization in parallel computer systems, languages, and applications. After getting his Doctor of Philosophy degree, Bal was a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona and at Imperial College in London. He then came back to the Vrije Universiteit as an Assistant Professor.
He used the grant of 1.6 million guilders (about $1 million) to start a research group on parallel programming.
His work has continued to focus on cluster computers, parallel programming languages, and parallel applications. A paper about this research, entitled "Solving the Game of Awari using Parallel Retrograde Analysis" was published in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer, October
2003 and received worldwide publicity. Bal has had about a dozen Doctor of Philosophy students and has written nearly 100 scientific papers in leading computer science conferences and journals.
He was also the driving force behind the acquisition and use of three large distributed cluster computers called the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer.
He is currently adjunct director of the $50 million VL-e research project as well as being a professor
Membership
Bal has also been a member of over 30 program committees, and as such has had a major impact on the field of parallel computing. Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers CS European Distinguished Visitor"s Program.
