Henri E. Bal | |
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| Born | 16 April 1958 |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Alma mater | Vrije Universiteit |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Vrije Universiteit |
| Doctoral advisor | Andrew S. Tanenbaum |
| Doctoral students | Werner Vogels |
Henri Elle Bal (born 16 April 1958) [1] is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is a well-known researcher in computer systems with a specialization in parallel computer systems, languages, and applications.
Bal received his engineer's degree from the Delft University of Technology in mathematics cum laude in 1982. [2] Shortly after graduating, he moved to the Vrije Universiteit where he began doing research on optimizing compilers in the Computer Systems group under the direction of Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. This work was so promising that Tanenbaum encouraged Bal to become a PhD student in his group. Bal's PhD research led to the development of the Orca programming language, one of the first programming languages intended for large-scale cluster computers. Unlike most other parallel programming languages, Orca is based on the shared-data object model, which allows a group of computers to have the illusion that they share data objects in a common memory. Programs can operate on these objects as though they were local, even though the only copy may be stored on a different machine. The run-time system maintains this illusion by replicating data automatically as needed and maintaining consistency between the copies. His PhD thesis, under Tanenbaum's supervision, was sufficiently influential that it was later published by Prentice-Hall as a book entitled Programming Distributed Systems. [3]
After getting his PhD degree, Bal was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, and at Imperial College in London. He then came back to the Vrije Universiteit as an assistant professor. Shortly thereafter he was awarded a 'Pionier' grant from the Dutch National Science Foundation, the most prestigious award then available to young researchers. He used the grant of 1.6 million guilders (about $1 million) to start a research group on parallel programming. In 1994 he became an associate professor and in 1998 he became a full professor. His work has continued to focus on cluster computers, parallel programming languages, and parallel applications.
Together with one of his students, John Romein, he solved the game of awari, a 3500-year-old game by cleverly enumerating all the possible positions reachable from the current position and choosing the best move, usually leading to a forced win. A paper [4] about this research, entitled "Solving the Game of Awari using Parallel Retrograde Analysis" was published in IEEE Computer, Oct. 2003 and received worldwide publicity. [5] [6] [7]
Bal has had about a dozen PhD students and has written nearly 100 scientific papers in leading computer science conferences and journals. He was also the driving force behind the acquisition and use of three large distributed cluster computers called the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer. Bal has also been a member of over 30 program committees, and as such has had a major impact on the field of parallel computing. He is currently adjunct director of the $50 million VL-e research project as well as being a professor.
Bal is the author or coauthor of three influential books:
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum, sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American–Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The literal translation of the Dutch name Vrije Universiteit is "Free University". "Free" refers to independence of the university from both the State and the Dutch Reformed Church. Both within and outside the university, the institution is commonly referred to as "the VU". Although founded as a private institution, the VU has received government funding on a parity basis with public universities since 1970. The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern Buitenveldert neighbourhood of Amsterdam and adjacent to the modern Zuidas business district.
Amoeba is a distributed operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and others at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The aim of the Amoeba project was to build a timesharing system that makes an entire network of computers appear to the user as a single machine. Development at the Vrije Universiteit was stopped: the source code of the latest version (5.3) was last modified on 30 July 1996.
Oware is an abstract strategy game among the mancala family of board games played worldwide with slight variations as to the layout of the game, number of players and strategy of play. Its origin is uncertain but it is widely believed to be of Ashanti origin.
Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (2014–2018). Dongarra is the founding director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He was the recipient of the Turing Award in 2021.
In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concurrent units, which can significantly improve overall speed of the execution in multi-processor and multi-core systems. In more technical terms, concurrency refers to the decomposability of a program, algorithm, or problem into order-independent or partially-ordered components or units of computation.
Transposition driven scheduling (TDS) is a load balancing algorithm for parallel computing. It was developed at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands as an algorithm to solve puzzles. The algorithm provides near-linear speedup with some problems and scales extremely well. It was published about by John Romein, Aske Plaat, Henri Bal and Jonathan Schaeffer.
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
The ICGA Journal is a quarterly academic journal published by the International Computer Games Association. It was renamed in 2000. Its previous name was the ICCA Journal of the International Computer Chess Association, which was founded in 1977.
Werner Hans Peter Vogels is the chief technology officer and vice president of Amazon in charge of driving technology innovation within the company. Vogels has broad internal and external responsibilities.
Roger Michael Needham was a British computer scientist.
Louis Victor Allis is a Dutch computer scientist working in the artificial intelligence (AI) field. In his graduate work, he revealed AI solutions for Connect Four, Qubic, and Gomoku. His dissertation introduced two new game search techniques: proof-number search and dependency-based search. Proof-number search has seen further successful application in computer Go tactical search and many other games.
Willibrordus Martinus Pancratius van der Aalst is a Dutch computer scientist and full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. His research and teaching interests include information systems, workflow management, Petri nets, process mining, specification languages, and simulation. He is also known for his work on workflow patterns.
Ignacio Martín Llorente is an entrepreneur, researcher and educator in the field of cloud and distributed computing. He is the director of OpenNebula, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and a full professor at Complutense University. Dr. Llorente is a IEEE Senior Member. He holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from UCM and an Executive MBA from IE Business School.
Roelf Johannes (Roel) Wieringa is a Dutch computer scientist who was a Professor of Information Systems at the University of Twente, specialized in the "integration of formal and informal specification and design techniques".
Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek is a Dutch computer scientist, entrepreneur, and Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Christopher (Chris) Verhoef is a Dutch computer scientist, and Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Reinder Pieter (Reind) van de Riet was a Dutch computer scientist and Emeritus Professor Information Systems at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, known for the development of COLOR-X, a linguistically-based event modeling language for object modeling.
Jacobus Willem (Jaco) de Bakker was a Dutch theoretical computer scientist and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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