Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 50th podcast From Research to Reality.
It's my great honor and pleasure to have Utz-Uwe Haus.
Hello, Utz.
- Hi, Dejan - Welcome.
Thanks for having me.
So Utz.
you came here to this beautiful place, very emotional to all people from HPE.
It's a garage. Bill and Dave's garage. But you came all the way from Switzerland.
And then even before that, you were in Germany.
So tell us, what was your beginning
of technology path?
Well, I shouldn't go back all the way in the beginning but I studied in Berlin
at TU, math, with a bit of computer science as a minor
mostly focusing on programming languages and compiler design,
but really going for math and I did a diploma
in that on differential geometry and then optimization.
that got me into a PhD position in [Madgeburg],
of all places, where we could have almost crossed paths, as we find out later,
because you were passing through there in the same years, in the nineties.
And then, after the PhD,
I stayed there and had a junior research group
in applying math and computation and computer science aspects.
Really programming interesting new algorithms for disciplines
that were not using optimization properly
through different disciplines, like material science, biology.
Systems, biology was coming up
at a research group in that
and that brought me to ETH eventually. So that is how I ended up in Switzerland.
I can tell you that your math knowledge really comes across
very effectively whenever we talk. But you mentioned you came to ETH
but now you are an HPE, prior that you worked at Cray.
Yeah, what’s that I am missing those points.
So, I came to ETH because if you have an option to go to ETH,
you don't refuse that.
My wife also liked to go to Switzerland for business reasons, just
finishing her education as a doctor.
And so I stayed there for around five years as an assistant, a senior assistant.
But then I had a project with Adrian Tate,
who was running in the city offices of Cray.
And after a few months of joint work on polyhedral compilation aspects,
I was frustrated with the academic career path and another
almost professorship somewhere.
And, and so I told him, look, if you ever have a position for me,
let me know.
When Cray offered me a position,
I started with Adrian to build a team out of Switzerland.
Very nice. Very nice. And then the rest is history.
So his young history, right.
We will make more history looking back at the garage. There is another 70 years to go.
So I miss you in [Madgeburg] but not here.
But, but there is another really important reason why we are here.
You were promoted recently. Congratulations. - Thank you.
Can you tell us what were you promoted for and a few details about it?
So, I was promoted to a Distinguished Technologist,
which is one of the really
interesting points in the career path in the TCP path of HPE.
And where I tell all the people in my team, essentially,
they should aspire to be master or better because it's a research team.
We do interesting stuff across the business
and that is really where my promotion comes from. So we've been influential,
not just me but the team, but me leading it
in numerous very big customer wind in Europe.
So that is clearly one of the big aspects of all of this.
Starting with LUMI, the European pre-exascale system
but also other ones like KAUST, recently, and similar ones.
So there is the business aspect, there is
the continuous presales integration where we've been called upon
to understand customer problems that
normal presales folks don't have an answer to.
Customers like that.
If they get more insight beyond what's in the catalog,
what’s in the general briefings
and that customer info intimacy. Also telling the customer intimacy,
telling our partners we've understood their problems before they wrote the RFP.
that is where our team shines and then there is pure research part.
So we had a number of interesting projects, where I wrote the proposal with others.
Some, more or less alone,
where we had an influence on European technology involvement.
And the fourth one really is the political aspect. It's an interesting
time for a global company like, previously Cray, now HPE
to be recognized for their investments,
even if they may be not as big as some European players want them to be
in Europe and get a share of that. So that requires political involvement,
policy-making, research, agenda-writing.
And I've spent quite a bit of time on that in recent years.
I think that is been rewarded with that from [INAUDIBLE].
So Norm Jouppi, senior fellow, who used to be my manager,
used to say that DT is one of the best positions,
even though there are a couple of higher positions,
you still have to meddle in technology
and you can enjoy it, and
I won't go in other details but because DT is on the technical path,
can you tell me, not about political aspects, but about
these technical aspects that you were promoted for
these first three contributions?
Right? So, so one was really algorithmic aspects in modeling energy systems.
So there was a project called Pan Forests where we really worked
on the solving aspects.
How can you solve certain mathematical optimization problems
on the gear that we like to sell?
So the very big Cray systems
we had to start small because people were coming
from laptops and there is a big gap in between.
So that was one of the aspects that we worked on.
Then there is a middleware we designed
called Maestro, which is on the infrastructure side
of where our software stack is currently falling short.
It allows you to model
the data movement or how to avoid data movement
independent of a programming obstruction.
And that is really valued by a recent award we got for Destination Earth,
where this is because we co-designed it with ECWMF, former Cray customer,
and, hopefully soon again customer, if we do the right things.
The European Center for Medium Term Weather Forecast.
They told us what their requirements would be
in the next
the next generation of large-scale weather and climate simulations
because data movement is where their codes are falling short, not computations.
And that is where we see it. we built that infrastructure.
I was very much involved in the design of that and the coding of that
using libfabric when the company hadn't decided to make
that the central part of our Slingshot Interconnect infrastructure,
but ready for it when everybody else joined the libfabric.
Where we said, oh yeah, we know how to do that.
And so that is where we are still working with the Slingshot team.
The software team around that to make sure our software runs best on our systems,
but it is portable to others.
Very nice. So what do you do? How do you… because you generate IP
and it goes through products,
but do you and your team also write papers, patents, standards,
how do you express yourself outside of products or in addition to products?
So actually the products part is maybe the weakest part that we,
we need to talk about how to make more product
outcomes out of our first development.
So we consider ourselves to be producing ideas and proof of concept pieces.
That, number one, we are really open-source to the community
where required by the funding agencies.
We do an internal advertisement for that.
We try to find groups that can make use of it.
And we reuse them in the next POC. So we don't have a patent yet. That is on my list.
I have a reasonable publication list from the academic times, I don't have a patent.
I always wanted one. So that is still in the works.
- We will do it together. - We will do that together.
In Cray patenting out of Europe was just not a topic.
So that is why we didn't do it back then.
Innovation disclosure is something we are learning how to do.
I think it's quite easy in some sense and
you get awarded so it's worth doing.
But we write papers,
we go to conferences and present our work internal and external.
And that is where we show the results.
Of course, some of the projects have actual deliverables and
they go to public or consortium wide dissemination.
So some of that doesn't have to be steered that much. So, it's really automatic.
You mentioned libfabric, it's not quite a standard,
could be considered almost the de facto standard.
Do you care about standards in your work?
So, standards is what keeps a business like ours, like the compute, or in particular,
the high-performance computing environment, alive.
We need interoperability and only standards can make that possible.
However, in some cases, you need to be ahead of the standard and
present something like libfabric, which is
by all means, not just a de facto standard, an upcoming standard.
And you see that by vendor adoption, right? Intel is using it, we are using it,
others are jumping on that reluctantly. So AWS is pushing it
so that it's becoming a standard by adoption.
But there is also standards that just need to be agreed upon.
NPI is an example like that where people took all the-learnings
of different parallel distributed programming paradigms and wrote a better one.
And so standards are important.
We are not actually… we do have someone on the MPI
standardization body at this time in our team.
It's something we do and four acronym aficionados,
POC is proof of concept,
AWS is Amazon Web Services
MPI is Message Passing Interface.
Yeah. Thanks for filling that in.
You end up in that niche of knowing your acronyms and
this audience may not know all of them.
So it may be obvious for a lot of people, but let's just
put it obviously for others.
How are we helping humanity? How are we helping Mother Earth?
Your work on sustainability seems to fall right there.
And you are also digital twin of the Earth
that you've been working on, seems to be.
Can you tell us a little bit more how you perceive that?
Right? I mean, our technology guided society these days,
has lots of opportunities for us to make a difference
by utilizing technology for good and not for bad.
It's always difficult for scientists to make that judgment when
they invent a new technology, because technology is agnostic
of its outcomes per se or we can make the difference.
And so if we use our high-performance computing engines or our AI engines
that fulfill certain roles, we can choose what to use them for.
We can also choose how to efficiently use them.
And so that brings us to the sustainability aspect.
And there has been a debate, in Europe in particular,
on how much energy do you want to spend on computations
to save the Earth from overheating, while you are cooling your devices?
Right?
Is it worth spending a GigaWatt on the compute
that in the end will only save a few watts
and doing the right thing, choosing the right problems to work on,
that is where we can make a difference. Telling people about what is possible,
how to efficiently use big compute, rather than many small computes or vice versa.
How to put compute in the edge.
If we could save a Watt in every telephone charger,
that would save more than we can save on any of our big installations in a week.
We always talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And you are very interesting…
You have very interesting perspective because you see how things are
in Europe and at least two countries and then in US,
can you compare the situation? How is it observed?
So I'd like to make the point first that so my team,
the media research lab is really distributed across Europe
and it's diverse in its nationality and cultural, scientific, personal backgrounds.
And gender, too.
Well, when they get hired
and have pro perspectives to do other things later on,
we don't hire for projects. We hire for people.
And so I consider it… maybe for Americans that is harder to understand,.
but I consider it a great win to have a French and a German in my team
to work together and not against, each other because in European history,
that is interesting.
We have someone from the Balkans, from Bosnia, actually, on the team,
we learn about their background, about their recent history,
about how Europe has not been free of wars in 80 years,
even before the Ukrainian crisis that we have now.
And we have this distribution of France, Germany, Switzerland,
with Italy, and Bosnia, and Britain, New Zealand, all in one team.
So we learn about the backgrounds of people in the team.
We take that as a, not challenge, even, just an opportunity
to do our team meetings in the different places,
learn about culture that is close to each other
and still historically far apart.
Does this equity and inclusion stop when it starts about soccer or not?
Well, I am a bit ignorant on any sports that involves round objects. That includes soccer.
So, I think actually, we have people who do sports of different sorts.
We don't really make fun of them for any reason.
and some of them have a strong opinion on which team should win which game.
And, I think that is the least important part. So, sports really,
is just one of the many aspects
of things people like or don't like in the team and
you need to understand how to not bother people in a team,
meeting with a soccer game.
If they don't want to go there, that is part of being equitable to everyone.
And inclusive. Very nice.
Can you tell me, have you observed any other differences, culturally or otherwise,
food, anything, across the geographies?
Well, food is diverse and we enjoy getting the different aspects of that.
Also, the diets people have are different and not just about
where they come from, but also what they enjoy.
We can go into that maybe later when we talk about hobbies, we should stay true
to the question at the moment, but really, that is part of it.
I spent quite a bit of time in the US, was in a US high school in the Midwest,
in Kansas, of all places.
So for me, the US is a second home. I observe differences.
I observe more differences over time, rather than over location.
So, 30 years back, Kansas was very different from what I see in the US nowadays.
But let's keep politics out of the technical talk today.
And then you've been working a lot.
I mean, we are almost working around the clock. When you wake up, I go to sleep.
You wake up very early. But tell me, but tell me what do you do outside of the work?
Too much. If I have spare time, I have a very old wooden [INAUDIBLE] sailing boat,
which is as old as I am.
that takes a lot of work to get back into running shape for every season.
In a small lake nearby.
So reasonably competitive with the neighbors, but not on a big scale.
I like do-it-yourself stuff.
So, looking at this garage gets me started immediately to look for a soldering iron
and I don't have one of these drilling machines and
I'd like to have one, but I have all kinds of woodworking equipment.
So that is part of it.
Cooking, baking, making sure my kids learn where food comes from,
how it's made, from sausages, to fulfill a German stereotype, and beer.
You have to make that yourself to know what you are having,
in another time when you don't make it yourself.
But also reading the French cooking guides of the 19th century.
- So very much different interests. - Beautiful.
You are the second sailor on the podcast, out of 50 podcasts.
So, did you have Nick here?
Nick Dube, yeah.
You'll have to send me some pictures of your sailing boat.
What else do you do? Or are you reading any books?
I don't have much time for reading these days.
So, occasionally I pick up an old one that I have, and I have many unread ones.
The unread stack I think lasts for another 100 years.
But yeah, I mean, there recently, I looked back into talking about
the US and its change as Travels with Charlie, a Steinbeck
novel from the fifties.
One of my favorites from high school times.
That is an interesting look on the US as it was and comparing it to today.
But I mean, there is good literature every year.
Patti Smith's recent poems, three years ago.
That was a good one.
Do you still read in German?
I do. I do read German. I do read Latin, occasionally.
I just went to an archive with my daughter to look at 15th century manuscripts
which in Switzerland,
you can actually get in the archive into your hand, in parchment, in real…,
which is something, in Germany, we are missing out of our historic loss.
It's a lost society, right? We lost all the archives, all the buildings,
every decade or five decades, on average,
while Switzerland has preserved a lot.
So that is a major difference for a German.
Switzerland is kind of this island of Europe as it has been destroyed around
in the centuries.
So both independence and staying away from the wars pays off long-term in a big way.
And there is a debate to be had about the wars.
I mean, Switzerland just exported the soldiers to other countries
and had treaties, how they cannot attack each other. And since they were at the front
of each of the European warfare nations,
they couldn't attack each other while they were crossing into Switzerland.
So there is politics, more than luck.
Since we are approaching the end of this podcast,
do you have any message for our younger colleagues? How can they follow your path
to the same or different destination?
You shouldn't follow others paths.
You should pick your own path, do what you are good at.
Do what you like and find a niche.
Don't stay in the niche but open it for others.
Prepare what you can do.
Show it. Don't be shy. If you have a good result, tell it to others
and find collaborators because you can't do anything alone.
You can do a lot alone, but even Bill and Dave were two, right?
So, you need to find your collaborators, find the right people who can help you
and who can give you the right input that you are lacking in your own inspirations.
Very nice. Very nice. Thank you very much. - Thank you, Dejan.
Thank you for having me.