Henri Bal
Encyclopedia
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
at the Vrije Universiteit
Vrije Universiteit
The Vrije Universiteit is a university in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Dutch name is often abbreviated as VU and in English the university uses the name "VU University". The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern part of Amsterdam in the Buitenveldert district...
, Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
. He is a well-known researcher in computer systems with a specialization in parallel computer systems, languages, and applications.
Education
Bal received his engineer's degreeEngineer's degree
An engineer's degree is an advanced academic degree in engineering that is conferred in Europe, some countries of Latin America, and a few institutions in the United States....
from the Delft University of Technology
Delft University of Technology
Delft University of Technology , also known as TU Delft, is the largest and oldest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands...
in mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
cum laude in 1982 . Shortly after graduating, he moved to the Vrije Universiteit
Vrije Universiteit
The Vrije Universiteit is a university in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Dutch name is often abbreviated as VU and in English the university uses the name "VU University". The university is located on a compact urban campus in the southern part of Amsterdam in the Buitenveldert district...
where he began doing research on optimizing compilers in the Computer Systems group under the direction of Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum. This work was so promising that Tanenbaum encouraged Bal to become a PhD student in his group. Bal's PhD research led to the development of the Orca programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
, one of the first programming languages intended for large-scale cluster computers. Unlike most other parallel programming languages, Orca is based on the shared-data object model, which allows a group of computers to have the illusion that they share data objects in a common memory. Programs can operate on these objects as though they were local, even though the only copy may be stored on a different machine. The run-time system maintains this illusion by replicating data automatically as needed and maintaining consistency between the copies.
His PhD thesis, under Tanenbaum's supervision, was sufficiently influential that it was later published by Prentice-Hall as a book entitled Programming Distributed Systems.
Career
After getting his PhDDoctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
degree, Bal was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, at the University of Arizona
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
in Tucson, Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
and at Imperial College in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. He then came back to the Vrije Universiteit as an Assistant Professor. Shortly thereafter he was awarded a 'Pionier' grant from the Dutch National Science Foundation, the most prestigious award then available to young researchers. He used the grant of 1.6 million guilders (about $1 million) to start a research group on parallel programming. In 1994 he became an Associate Professor and in 1998 he became a Full Professor. His work has continued to focus on cluster computers, parallel programming languages, and parallel applications.
Together with one of his students, John Romein, he solved the game of awari, a 3500-year old game by cleverly enumerating all the possible positions reachable from the current position and choosing the best move, usually leading to a forced win. A paper about this research, entitled "Solving the Game of Awari using Parallel Retrograde Analysis" was published in IEEE Computer, Oct. 2003 and received worldwide publicity.
Bal has had about a dozen PhD students and has written nearly 100 scientific papers in leading computer science conferences and journals. He was also the driving force behind the acquisition and use of three large distributed cluster computers called the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer. Bal has also been a member of over 30 program committees, and as such has had a major impact on the field of parallel computing. He is currently adjunct director of the $50 million VL-e research project as well as being a professor.
Honors
- Numerous invited lectures and keynote addresses at conferences (e.g., IEEE Cluster 2000; CANPC '00; Global Grid Forum, 2001)
- Member of the IEEE CS European Distinguished Visitor's Program
- Best Paper Award at Int'l Conf. on Parallel Processing, 1998
Books
Bal is the author or coauthor of three influential books:- Programming Distributed Systems, Prentice-Hall, 1991
- Programming Language Essentials (with Dick Grune), Addison-Wesley, 1994
- Modern Compiler Design (with Dick Grune, Ceriel Jacobs, and Koen Langendoen), Wiley, 2000