Home page of Sverre Jarp

Current job activities (2011)

Since the autumn of 2002, I have been active in the As the Technology Officer (CTO), I oversee the technical aspects of CERN openlab III. Additionally, I act as the interface to Intel for all technical coordination with openlab. I also coordinate the openlab Summer Student Programme.

Short CV:

I was born in Oslo, Norway in 1949. In December 1971 I graduated from the Polytechnical University of Trondheim (NTNU) with a degree in theoretical physics. My thesis was entitled "Production of electron-positron pairs by collisions of photons and electrons". My interest in computers started during this period, mainly due to the Univac systems available at the University. Not everybody can claim that they were exposed to object-oriented programming in the late sixties thanks to Simula!

Since January 1974 I work at CERN in the Information Technology (IT) Department. Before being appointed openlab CTO I was active in the following activities:

• Systems programmer on Control Data Systems (1974 -1978)
• Systems programmer on IBM mainframes (MVS & VM operating systems) (1979 - 1982)
• Manager of systems programming (first IBM, then also DEC, Cray, and UNIX workstations) (1983 - 93)
• Performance analyst and tuning expert of physics jobs (simulation, analysis, etc.) (since 1993)
• Liaison officer between the ATLAS experiment and the Information Technology (IT) Division (1995 – 2001)
• Manager of a “future processor” project with Hewlett-Packard (1995 - 1999). Co-ordinator of a vector math library (VML) project on Itanium (IA-64) with Hewlett-Packard (1998-1999)
• Evangelist for Commodity Technologies and Performance Optimisation. See, for instance, the trend-setting CHEP-95 presentation: "PC as Physics Computer for LHC", the conclusions of the 1995 "Performance Awareness Study", or the CHEP-97 presentation: "Helping to choose the right commodity compilers for High Energy Physics". At CHEP-98 I made a presentation about the performance of the Random Number Generators in the CLHEP Class Library.
• Involvement in the PASTA technology forecasting team (1996, 1999, and 2005). Here is an example: the 2002 PASTA reports.
• Project leader at CERN of the “TRILLIAN” project; an collaborative effort which successfully ported Linux to the Itanium (IA-64) architecture (1999-2001)
  For those interested in the Itanium (IA-64) Architecture, please consult my detailed Itanium (IA-64) tutorial or my Itanium (IA-64) Performance Brief
• CERN-wide co-ordinator of the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem (1998 –1999)
• Project leader of the “LHC TestBed” project (2000-2001)
• Also worth mentioning: TEACC membership (1998-2001) and Chairmanship (2000-2001), Computing Colloquia organisation (1995-2001), and IT/PDP deputy group leadership (2000-2001).

Between October 2001 and September 2002 I was on sabbatical leave in the United States, working at HP Labs in Palo Alto.

How to reach me at work: Sverre Jarp, IT Department, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

Telephone: +41.76.487.3428 or +41.22.767.4944 Fax: +41.22.767.7155

Visitors: since 18 Oct. 1999

Last update: 25 January 2011