Norbert Attig Retires

Having worked for over 34 years at the institute, Dr. Norbert Attig started the leisure phase of his partial retirement at the end of May 2023. In 1988, he joined the Central Institute for Applied Mathematics – the predecessor of JSC – as a young postdoc working as administrator of the then existing CRAY systems. A few years later, he took over new tasks to strengthen the support of supercomputer users. Within this framework, he organized several winter schools and conferences, and pushed the idea of participating in the ISC and SC exhibitions with a booth. Starting with the SC’98 exhibition, Norbert organized JSC’s participation in these conferences for at least ten years.

In 2007, Norbert became head of the application support division at JSC – a position he held until October 2022. He also was very active as a science manager: he served as the topic speaker for the supercomputer facility in the Helmholtz programmes over three periods, represented the JSC in almost all compute time granting meetings, and became JSC’s deputy head together with Thomas Eickermann in 2012. He made major contributions to the setup of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), its governance, and the GCS scientific steering committee, and he was involved in numerous nationally and EU-funded projects.

JSC bid farewell to Norbert Attig at JSC’s summer event in September last year. In April, his achievements were also honoured at the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing by the NIC community and collaborators from Poland and Cyprus with whom he maintained good connections over years.

JSC wishes Norbert Attig all the best for the coming years and finally for his retirement!

The position of deputy director of JSC has been taken over by Dr. Thomas Eickermann. The application support division is now headed jointly by Dr. Wolfgang Frings and Dr. Bernd Mohr.

Contact: Dr. Sabine Höfler-Thierfeldt