Torsten Hoefler is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

ETH Zurich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ran ...

and the Chief Architect for Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Previously, he led the Advanced Application and User Support team at the Blue Waters Directorate of the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers in the United States. NCSA is currently led by Professor Bill ...

, and held an

adjunct professor An adjunct professor is a type of academic appointment in higher education who does not work at the establishment full-time. The terms of this appointment and the job security of the tenure vary in different parts of the world, but the term is gen ...

position at the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His expertise lies in large-scale

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

and high-performance computing systems. He focuses on applications in large-scale artificial intelligence as well as climate sciences. Hoefler is an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

. He is also a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). His Erdos number is two. He has been invited to present several

keynote A keynote in public speaking is a talk that establishes a main underlying theme. In corporate or commercial settings, greater importance is attached to the delivery of a keynote speech or keynote address. The keynote establishes the framework fo ...

lectures at major international conferences such as ACM's

Federated Computing Research Conference The Federated Computing Research Conference, FCRC, is an event that brings together several academic conferences, workshops, and plenary talks in the field of computer science. FCRC has been organized and held in the United States in 1993, 1996, 19 ...

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

Cluster, HPC Asia, Supercomputing Asia, or the

International Symposium on Distributed Computing The International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) is an annual academic conference for refereed presentations, whose focus is the theory, design, analysis, implementation, and application of distributed systems and networks. The Symposium ...

Career

Hoefler received his

Diplom A ''Diplom'' (, from ) is an academic degree in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and a similarly named degree in some other European countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia ...

from TU Chemnitz where he received the best student award in 2005. He worked on

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

systems from the very beginning of his career. He continued his studies at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration o ...

, the home of

Open MPI Open MPI is a Message Passing Interface (MPI) library project combining technologies and resources from several other projects (FT-MPI, LA-MPI, LAM/MPI, and PACX-MPI). It is used by many TOP500 supercomputers including Roadrunner, which was th ...

, under the guidance of Prof. Andrew Lumsdaine. He received his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 2008 from

and was subsequently honored with the university's Young Alumni Award as well as Distinguished Alumni Award He continued his work on the

Message Passing Interface The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a portable message-passing standard designed to function on parallel computing architectures. The MPI standard defines the syntax and semantics of library routines that are useful to a wide range of use ...

standard as a key member of the MPI Forum responsible for the chapters on Collective Communication and Process Topologies as well as co-authoring the chapter on One-Sided Communications. In 2010, he joined the

at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

(UIUC). As lead for application performance analysis and support, he supported the design and deployment of the Blue Waters

Supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

. He also held a position as

at UIUC's

department. He accepted a position as

assistant professor Assistant professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doct ...

in 2011, where he received

tenure Tenure is a type of academic appointment that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Academic tenure originated in the United ...

in 2017, and is

full professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a 'person who professes'. Professors ...

from 2020. Hoefler has held various visiting researcher positions at French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

, CINECA in

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

, as well as

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United Sta ...

, Sandia National Laboratory, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

in the United States. As a consultant, he supported Cray Inc. in the area of high-performance networking and

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

in the areas of

quantum computing A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...

and large-scale

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

systems. He spent his

sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work; "an extended period of time intentionally spent on something that’s not your routine job." The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Bi ...

in 2019 at

helping to establish various AI supercomputing efforts including the Maia 100 system. Hoefler has been an elected member of the ACM SIGHPC executive committee since its founding in 2011. He was elected

for “contributions to large-scale parallel processing systems and supercomputers”,

for “foundational contributions to High-Performance Computing and the application of HPC techniques to machine learning”, and he received the

Sidney Fernbach Award in 2022 for “application-aware design of HPC algorithms, systems and architectures, and transformative impact on scientific computing and industry”. Hoefler received the inaugural

Jack Dongarra Jack Joseph Dongarra (born July 18, 1950) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Univers ...

award at ISC High Performance Conference in 2023. He was appointed as a senior fellow of the

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) is a sovereign wealth fund owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, founded to invest funds on behalf of the Government of Abu Dhabi. It manages the emirate's excess oil reserves a ...

Labs in 2023.

Research impact

Hoefler is known for his contributions to the

(MPI) standard. He served as author for the chapters “Collective Communication” and “Process Topologies” in MPI-2.

and the chapters “Collective Communication”, “One-Sided Communications”, and “Process Topologies” in MPI-

For the MPI-3 standardization, he chaired the Collective operation, Collective Communications and

Topology Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...

working groups. He developed principles for the implementation of nonblocking collective operations and remote memory access that are widely used in MPI implementations such as OpenMPI, MPICH, and derivatives. Nonblocking collective operations such as allreduce, allgather, or broadcast form the basis of modern AI training systems. After co-authoring a pioneering paper on parallel

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

and during his sabbatical at

, he coined the term “3D parallelism” in modern

training that organizes

data parallelism Data parallelism is parallelization across multiple processors in parallel computing environments. It focuses on distributing the data across different nodes, which operate on the data in parallel. It can be applied on regular data structures like ...

pipeline A pipeline is a system of Pipe (fluid conveyance), pipes for long-distance transportation of a liquid or gas, typically to a market area for consumption. The latest data from 2014 gives a total of slightly less than of pipeline in 120 countries ...

parallelism, and operator/tensor parallelism into one consistent view. In his work on high-speed interconnects, he co-developed several award-winning

network topologies Network topology is the arrangement of the elements ( links, nodes, etc.) of a communication network. Network topology can be used to define or describe the arrangement of various types of telecommunication networks, including command and cont ...

and contributed routing algorithms that are used in the OpenSM routing manager on

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

computer clusters A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The newes ...

. On the application side, Hoefler focuses on improving the performance of climate simulations as a

digital twin A digital twin is a digital model of an intended or actual real-world physical product, system, or process (a ''physical twin'') that serves as a digital counterpart of it for purposes such as simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and m ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

for climate simulations. He has been a convener of the Berlin Summit in Earth Virtualization Engines to develop strategies to enable global access to high-resolution climate simulations.

Scientific reproducibility

Hoefler has been vocal about improving reproducibility of performance measurements in

and later

. The latter is featured in IEEE Computer Journal as a cover feature on Research Reproducibility. As Technical Papers chair of ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC18), he introduced a new revision-based review process to the conference to improve the quality of the publications. His group received the SIGHPC Certificate of Appreciation for reproducible methods at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC22) ACM student cluster competition. His paper on HammingMesh received the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC22) Best Reproducibility Advancement Award. He also presented the opening keynote at the first ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability.

Awards and honors

Hoefler and his team received six best (student) paper awards at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference between 2010 and 2023, the top conference in

High-Performance Computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

. Additional important awards are listed below. 2025 * ACM Prize in Computing 2024 * Max Planck Humboldt Medal jointly awarded by the

Max Planck Society The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the M ...

, the

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation () is a foundation that promotes international academic cooperation between scientists and scholars from Germany and abroad. Established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, it is funded by t ...

, and the

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

Federal Ministry of Education and Research. 2023 *

, class of 2022 *

Early Career Award 2022 *

CS Sidney Fernbach Award * Luddy Distinguished Alumni Award *

, class of 2021 2021 * HPCWire "People to Watch" 2020 * ERC Consolidator Grant * BenchCouncil Rising Star Award 2019 * ACM Gordon Bell Prize *

TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (MCR) 2015 *

Latsis Latsis (; ) can be either a Greek surname or a Russified form of the Latvian language surname Lācis Lācis (Latvian orthography#Old orthography, Old orthography: ''Lahz(i)(s)''; feminine: Lāce) is a Latvian people, Latvian Latvian surname, surn ...

Prize of

ETH Zürich ETH Zurich (; ) is a public university in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the university focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ETH Zurich ra ...

* ERC Starting Grant 2014 * Young Alumni Award,

School of Informatics 2013 *

TCSC Young Achievers in Scalable Computing *

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Faculty Award 2012 * SIAM SIAG/SC Junior Scientist Prize

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoefler, Torsten Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 2022 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the IEEE Members of Academia Europaea Faculty Indiana University Bloomington alumni