Hans Werner Meuer, who founded the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) series, has died aged 77, after a courageous battle with cancer.
With his larger than life personality and infectious enthusiasm for high-performance computing, he was universally known and liked in the supercomputing community, becoming a public face of, and an international ambassador for, supercomputing in Europe and worldwide.
Professor Meuer's involvement in computing and data processing began in 1960. He served as a specialist, project leader, group and department head at the Research Centre in Jülich, Germany, from 1962 – 1973. He was then director of the computing centre and professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim, Germany, for 26 years.
Together with Erich Strohmaier (formerly at Mannheim, now at the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee), he started the Top500 list in 1993. The list ranks the most powerful computers in the world in terms of their performance against a standard benchmark (Linpack).
From 1998 – 2013, professor Meuer was the managing director of Prometeus which manages all ISC events. In 2000, he became emeritus professor at the University of Mannheim.
He is survived by his wife, Ursula, and his sons, Andreas, Martin and Thomas. Martin and Thomas Meuer will act as managing directors of Prometheus and continue the ISC conference series.
