Olaf Schenk

Olaf Schenk is a Professor at the Institute of Computing within the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Switzerland. He serves as Director of the Institute of Computing and Co-Director of the Master in Computational Science. He is also an adjunct member of the Computer Systems Institute at USI.

• PhD in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich (2001)
• Venia Legendi in Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Basel (2009)
• Applied Mathematics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

His research focuses on high-performance computing, computational science and engineering, and applied algorithms for extreme-scale simulations. He bridges computer science with scientific computing needs, particularly in parallel algorithms, sparse solvers, graph analytics, and manycore architectures. His work emphasizes scalable software tools and programming models for emerging HPC systems.

The 15 most recent publications reflect a consistent focus on sparse matrix computations, parallel and task-based algorithms, graph partitioning, and performance optimization for heterogeneous and manycore systems. Keywords span high-performance computing, numerical linear algebra, and large-scale data analysis, showing strong integration of theoretical algorithm design with practical implementation.

Olaf Schenk has received several prestigious honors:

• Elected Fellow, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
• Senior Member, IEEE and ACM
• SIAM Supercomputing Prize 2023
• IBM Faculty Award
• Two Leadership Computing Awards from the U.S. Department of Energy

He has held leadership roles as Chair, Vice Chair, and Program Director of the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing. He serves as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software and on the editorial board of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. He has participated in over 60 international program committees, including top-tier conferences such as SC, IPDPS, and IEEE CSE. He advises PhD and Master’s students in computational science and leads research projects funded by national and international agencies. He is also the Founder & Director of Panua Technologies Sagl, focusing on high-end software for simulation and optimization.

His research group at USI works on next-generation computing tools for extreme-scale scientific simulations, with ongoing work in adaptive algorithms, resilience, and hybrid CPU-GPU computing. He leads collaborative projects with institutions in Europe and the U.S., aiming to develop scalable, robust, and efficient software for future exascale systems.