Harry Wijshoff, the first scientific director and creator of Liacs, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, founded in 1996, died March 28 after a short illness. He was 63 years old.
After studying mathematics at Utrecht State University, Wijshoff earned his doctorate in 1987 under Professor Jan van Leeuwen, with a thesis on "data organization in parallel computers. After his doctorate, he came to work as a scientific assistant in Utrecht, and visited the Supercomputing Center of the University of Illinois and Nasa Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in the United States. There he worked on the Cedar computer, where he built up great knowledge in the field of distributed systems, and supercomputers.
In 1992, at an early age, he became a professor of applied computer science at Leiden University. Not much later, in 1996, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (Liacs) was founded with Wijshoff as its first scientific director. He was also involved in setting up computer science education courses for business set up, such as for CMG, Aegon, and PTT Post. The Spin-Off Initiative Leiden (Soil), a nursery of it-based companies, was also an initiative of his, Leiden University said in an in memoriam.
Wijshoff did research on parallel programming languages, compilers, and algorithms for sparse-matrix computations, ('rare matrices') with applications in weather prediction and astronomy, among others. He led the high performance computing (hpc) group in Leiden and was instrumental in founding the national research school ASCI, the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging. Wijshoff also spearheaded the creation of the DAS, the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer, a succession of hpc systems spread across Leiden, Delft, Amsterdam and Utrecht. In 1997, the first DAS became operational; currently the DAS-6 is operating for researchers.
