June 1936 – January 2014

High-performance computist

Computers are better when networked. So, too, are computer scientists — and Hans Meuer is the one who brought them together.

In 1986, Meuer — a professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and an evangelist for high-performance computing (HPC) — founded the annual convention Supercomputing Europe. The event later broadened to a global scope as the International Supercomputing Conference, uniting the industry's foremost thinkers and developers.

Meuer encouraged his colleagues to not just collaborate, but compete. In 1993, he began ranking the 500 most powerful computers in the world. The TOP500 list is updated twice annually and is used by companies and countries to competitively chart their progress.

Meuer's work brought people and technologies together, and his list and conference continue. He was 77.