A high-energy physicist by education, I am since more than two decades involved in the design, development and deployment of large-scale distributed data handling systems, ranging from object- and relational-databases to distributed storage clusters.

Data and Analysis Preservation

Data Center Analysis

Since WLCG went into stable operation, I spend a fraction my time with the statistical analysis of CERN computer center metrics in order to help optimising the efficiency of scientific analysis workflows.

Recent analysis areas included:

  • analysis of storage media failure rates in a population of 90k disk units
  • interaction between storage and CPU efficiency
  • quantification of WAN latency impact on specific science workflows

Responsibilities

Currently, I lead the Technical Delivery cluster of groups in CERN’s IT department which consists of:

  • IT-CA - Collaborative Applications
  • IT-CD - Compute & Devices
  • IT-CS - Communication Systems
  • IT-DA - Databases & Analytics
  • IT-FA - Fabric
  • IT-PW - Platforms & Workflows
  • IT-SD - Storage & Data Management
  • IT-TD - Technical Delivery

Education

  • 1995 PhD degree in physics, University of Hamburg
  • 1990 Diplom degree in physics, University of Hamburg
  • 1986 Physics and computer science studies at University of Münster and Hamburg

Other Roles and Memberships

  • IT department representative in CERN’s Open Data Policy working group
  • Part-time lecturer for Advanced Data Analysis at University of Lausanne
  • Leader of the LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project for persistency framework development
  • Leader of the WLCG Distributed Database Deployment project
  • Organiser of XLDB Europe 2013 and session organiser XLDB Europe 2017
  • Program comittee chair of Computing in High Energy Physic (CHEP) 2012
  • Invited reviewer at ESA (2001), NIF(2011) and LHC experiment (ATLAS, LHCb, CMS) project reviews
  • Ph.D project supervisior or Ph.D thesis supervisor at (Univ. Vienna (2001), Univ. Paris (2006) and Braunschweig Univ. of Technology)
  • CERN Summer Student Lecture Program Committee (2007-2013), responsible for computing related lectures
  • ACM member
  • Frequent reviewer of storage related publications

Selected Presentations

  • Invited as external expert to ISAT Storage Meeting 2016 (New York), ReThink Big, Roadmap for European Technologies for Big Data, project meetings (2015)
  • Invited lecturer representing the LHC Computing Grid at the first CERN – Thailand Computing School, Bangkok, Thailand 2010.
  • Back-end storage - use as a true archive, WLCG Data & Storage Management Jamboree, Amsterdam, June 2010
  • Invited CHEP plenary, Distributed Data and Meta Data Management, CHEP 2009, Prague, Czech Republic
  • Petabyte Scale Data Management for LHC, Workshop on Data Storage, ESRF Grenoble, June 2008
  • Presented CERN’s grid and database activities in a keynote talk by Intel CEO Paul Otellini at the Oracle Open World Conference 2007
  • Lecturer at the 1998, 2001 and 2004 CERN School of Computing
  • DEXA 2000 - paper on File replica consistency in a Grid environment, 2000
  • Invited Talk about ODBMS Data Stores in HEP at the 2000 OMG ObjectWorld conference in Frankfurt, Germany
  • Invited tutorial on Petabyte Object Databases at the 1999 ACM SIGMOD/PODS conference - Philadelphia, USA

Publications

  • An up-to-date list can be obtained from Inspire.
  • A older (status 2016) PDF version is available here.
  • There are also a few links / references at my ResearchGate entry.