Welcome to my home page at the University of Paderborn. I was a member of the research group of Prof. Burkhard Monien from 1993 to 2000. The first years I was involved in several projects funded by the European Union (EU) and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (bmb+f). During that time my research was focused on combinatorial optimization problems. Together with my colleague Torsten Fahle I developed an efficient parallel algorithm for the solution of large real-world vehicle routing problems.

Later, my research was focused on direct methods for the solution of linear equation systems. Especially, I was interested in fill-reducing ordering methods for sparse Cholesky factorization. The direct solution of sparse linear systems plays an important role in many scientific applications such as linear programming and structual engineering. The importance of Cholesky's method is mainly due to its generality and robustness.

I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Paderborn in December 2000. Based on the results of my thesis I developed a software library for the solution of large sparse positive definite linear systems. The SPACE (SPArse Cholesky Elimination) library contains functions to solve those systems in serial or in parallel using MPI. The numerical kernels of SPACE are based on BLAS-3 like operations. Although completely written in C code, the design of the library follows object-oriented principles. To obtain the latest release of the software package (full source code) please contact Holger Nitsche.

If you want to learn more about my research activities or the projects I was involved in, follow the links on the top of this page. There is also a link that refers to a list of my publications and my Ph.D. thesis.