Professor Torsten Hoefler

Following a “Performance as a Science” vision, Professor Hoefler combines mathematical models of architectures and applications to design optimized computing systems.  Before joining ETH Zurich, he led the performance modeling and simulation efforts for the first sustained Petascale supercomputer, Blue Waters, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a key contributor to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard where he chaired the "Collective Operations and Topologies" working group. 

In 2024, he was honoured with the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Medal – one of Germany’s most distinguished scientific prizes - as well as the ACM Prize in Computing. The awards recognised Professor Hoefler’s pioneering work and significant contributions to improving algorithmic efficiency for applications in high-performance computing and AI, particularly in climate research.

Torsten won best paper awards at ACM/IEEE Supercomputing in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2019, 2022, and at other international conferences.  He has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles and has won numerous prizes for his work, including the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award in 2022, and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2019. Torsten was elected to the first steering committee of ACM's SIGHPC in 2013 and he was re-elected for every term since then.  His research interests revolve around the central topic of performance-centric system design and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling for large-scale simulations and artificial intelligence systems.