Biography

Rob Bisseling
Since March 1, 2009 I am a full professor in Scientific Computing at the Mathematics Institute of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where I have been employed since 1993. My main research field is numerical and and combinatorial scientific computing in general, and parallel algorithms, sparse matrix computations, graph algorithms, and their application in Big Data in particular.

I am the coordinator of the track Applied Mathematics, Complex Systems, and Scientific Computing track of the Master's program Mathematical Sciences of Utrecht University. One course I teach, for 27 years now, and which I particularly like, is Parallel Algorithms , which has the bulk synchronous parallel (BSP) model as its basis. Based on the course, I wrote a book, Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI, by Rob H. Bisseling, Oxford University Press, March 2004. ISBN 978-0-19-852939-2. The second edition is currently in press, and it will appear mid-2020.

I have co-authored various open-source software packages: Mondriaan for partitioning sparse matrices (2002); SAWdoubler for counting self-avoiding walks on a lattice (2012); and the BSP libraries MulticoreBSP for Java (2012), MulticoreBSP for C (2014), and Bulk (2018). Since 2000, I maintain the website of the BSP Worldwide organization. I was co-chair of the SIAM conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing in Seattle, WA, in 2010. I was local chair of the Dutch Mathematical Congress 2017 in Utrecht. I have been member of the steering committee of the SIAM Workshop on Combinatorial Scientific Computing since 2011.

I will be a joint invited speaker at the SIAM conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, and the SIAM workshop on Combinatorial Scientific Computing in Seattle, Feb. 12, 2020. In May 2014, I was a visiting professor at the University of Orleans, France. In Spring 2010, I was a visiting scientist at CERFACS and INRIA, Toulouse, France, within the European MyPlanet project. In Spring 2004, I spent three months as a visiting researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, USA, investigating parallel hypergraph partitioning. In Spring 2000, I was a visiting fellow funded by EPSRC at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. In Spring 1997, I was a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics Biomedical in Jerusalem.

From 1987 to 1993 I worked as a research mathematician at the Mathematics and Computer Science department of the Koninklijke/Shell-Laboratory in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I investigated parallel algorithms for numerical linear algebra with applications in oil refinery optimisation and polymer simulation.

I received a PhD degree in theoretical chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1987. The title of my PhD thesis is "Fast Integral Transforms as a Tool in Molecular Dynamics". The subject of this work is the use of spectral methods for the solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation.

I received BSc and MSc degrees in mathematics, cum laude, in 1977 and 1981, respectively, from the Catholic University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. My master's thesis is in the area of functional analysis.


Last update of this page: January 26, 2020

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