The people behind CloudBroker

Wibke Sudholt

Associate and Chair of the Management

Wibke Sudholt came to cloud computing from a natural sciences background, with her experience being enriched by international environments, leadership functions, and academic-industry cooperation. She obtained chemistry diploma and doctoral degrees in Germany (at University of Dortmund and Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf), and received postdoctoral training in the USA (at the University of California, San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center) and Switzerland (at ETH Zurich and University of Zurich). She focused on computational chemistry, and became involved in multi-national grid computing projects as a postdoc. For three years she was working as project leader for grid computing at the University of Zurich, and chaired the executive board of the Swiss National Grid Association (SwiNG) for one year. She now is a member of the executive board of Cloud Suisse. Her main areas of expertise are the porting and enabling of applications on distributed computer infrastructures, as well as the management of corresponding projects and people. Her domain experience reaches from chemistry to insurance. Through projects involving industry partners she got insight into enterprise computing environments.

Peter Kunszt

Associate and Manager

Peter Kunszt has developed large-scale computing applications already for his PhD in theoretical physics (at the University of Bern). At the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, he has been one of the lead developers of the science archive for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, in cooperation with Microsoft Research. After returning to Europe, Peter was leading development teams on large-scale data management and grid middleware services at CERN for five years, being responsible for many of the distributed data services used also today. Later, he was responsible for building and maintaining support teams for computationally intensive projects at ETH Zurich's Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). He now is project manager of the SystemsX.ch Biology IT (SyBIT). He has a very wide network of international connections both in academia and industry due to his activities in standardization bodies (including SwiNG) and international project coordination. He also has operational knowledge of large computing infrastructures through CSCS and CERN.

Arthur J. Thomas

Associate

Arthur J. Thomas has been active at the interface between informatics and the life and medical sciences for over 30 years. With an undergraduate degree in biology (from Oxford) and a PhD in computer science (from Stanford), he is well placed to understand how new distributed computing paradigms can be effectively used in biomedical research and drug discovery. For two years he was coordinator of the Swiss Bio Grid project, a successful joint academia and industry effort to create a platform for distributed life sciences computing in Switzerland, and also a consultant to the Vital-IT High Performance Computing Center of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). He now works as principal research associate in Computational and Systems Medicine at University College London. He has consulted for many pharmaceutical and biotech companies. He has also been involved in the creation of several successful start-up companies, and thus has significant entrepreneurial experience. Among his start-ups was a Swiss company which applied knowledge-based systems technology to portfolio management, so he also had some useful exposure to the computational finance sector.