Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut

Thomas Radke Address: Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI) Am Mühlenberg 1 14476 Golm Germany Office: 0.70 Ground floor East wing Phone: +49-331-567-7194 Fax: +49-331-567-7252 E-mail: tradke@aei.mpg.de

I'm a senior computer scientist working as a scientific application programmer in the Astrophysical Relativity division at AEI. Within this Physics research division I am leading a small e-Science group of currently four other computer scientists. The focus of our work is to provide the Astrophysicists in the Numerical Relativity Group and the Gravitational Wave Group with innovative software tools and taylored techniques to efficiently perform numerical simulations as well as large-scale data analysis tasks.
Specifically, this includes areas such as performance optimization, parallel I/O, remote visualization, monitoring and steering of running Cactus jobs, and Grid Computing issues.

Research Projects (in reverse order):

• Since September 2005 I am leading the e-Science group which is funded by AEI and the AstroGrid-D project as part of the German D-Grid initiative. AstroGrid is a joint project of major German astronomical research institutes, some computer-science groups involved in grid-specific research, and some high-performance computing centres. It uses the Cactus toolkit as one of its driver applications to develop grid-enabled software.
• Until December 2004 I worked for GridLab, a Grid Computing project funded by the European Union. Its goal was to grid-enable Cactus using arbitrary Grid middleware services and components through a generic grid application toolkit interface.
• Within the TIKSL project I worked on the integration of Cactus in tele-immersive environments and on remote visualization techniques for analyzing Cactus data. These research topics had been continued and extended into a Grid Computing context in the GriKSL project.
• When I came to Potsdam in 1999, I joined the Cactus group at AEI as a scientific application programmer. My special responsibilities as a Cactus Code maintainer covered the design and implementation of the Cactus 4.0 communication and I/O infrastructure.
• I also contributed to the Linux kernel development by adding Symmetric Multiprocessing support (some  credits).
• Following research topics included the development of a low-level communication driver for SCI-coupled systems and the design of a multithreaded MPI layer for PC clusters.
• During my study of Information Technology and Computer Science at the University of Technology Chemnitz I started my parallel programming career on a KSR-1 Shared-Memory-Multiprocessor, a Parsytec PowerGC MPP, and a quad-processor Linux PC. My first parallel (and very nice looking) program was the calculation of the Mandelbrot set. I wrote my Master's Thesis about the parallelization of artificial neural networks and their integration into a simulation framework for adapative modular systems.