He had a life-changing experience in his teens when his father who worked for the West German-American military was sent to El Paso, Texas for two years.
It sparked in him a love of travel and of the U.S. His hobbies included reading science fiction books, hiking, and gardening.
and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University where he began his research in high performance computing, addressing operating and programming systems support for the Cm* multiprocessor.
His thesis, “Tailoring Software for Multiple Processor Systems,” was selected as one of six theses in 1982 to be printed as a book in the “Computer Science Series” by UMI Research Press.
He won the 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Award and is elected IEEE Fellow at 2016 posthumously.