Lars Pastewka
Chief Information Officer (CIO)
Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolLars Pastewka is a technology leader and physicist with 12 years of experience who combines academic rigor as a professor with executive IT stewardship as CIO at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and CTO at Surface Design Solutions. He brings deep expertise in computational mechanics and large-scale simulation I/O—demonstrated by significant open-source contributions to netcdf4-python and LAMMPS that added parallel I/O and large-dataset NetCDF support. Comfortable spanning research, software engineering, and infrastructure, he has repeatedly translated scientific codes into robust, production-ready tooling. His background includes Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships and group leadership at KIT, reflecting a rare mix of high-performance computing know-how and institutional leadership. Based in Freiburg, he leverages this blend to modernize research IT and scale simulation workflows for demanding scientific applications.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Physics, PhD, Physics at The University of FreiburgMSc, Physics, MSc, Physics at North Carolina State UniversityAbitur, Abitur at Max-Planck-Gymnasium Gelsenkirchen-Buer
Github Skills (17)
c-language10
molecular-simulation10
python10
lammps10
mpi10
travis-ci10
cicd10
dynamics10
molecular-dynamics-simulation10
parallel-computing10
build-automation10
netcdf10
cprogramming-language10
simulation9
hdf9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
lammps/lammps
Jun 2017 - Jan 2019
Public development project of the LAMMPS MD software package
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 commits, 4 PRs, 20 comments in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Lars's primary contributions focused on enhancing the NetCDF output functionality within the LAMMPS MD software. They modified the code to handle large datasets, specifically addressing the limitations of 32-bit offsets and enabling multi-file writes for improved data management. Furthermore, the user refactored the NetCDF integration by renaming internal functions, and correcting issues in data handling related to the bigint data type. These changes aimed to improve the software's ability to write and manage large simulation data.
lammpsmolecular-dynamicssimulationkokkos
Unidata/netcdf4-python
Mar 2019 - Mar 2019
netcdf4-python: python/numpy interface to the netCDF C library
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:13 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 2 days
Contributions summary:Lars significantly contributed to enabling parallel I/O capabilities within the netcdf4-python library. Their work involved adding support for PnetCDF, including installing the library in the Travis CI build script and integrating it into the build process. Furthermore, the user updated the test suite and compiler flags to incorporate the new parallel functionality, demonstrating a focus on infrastructure and testing alongside core library development. These changes indicate a strong understanding of build systems and parallel computing.
c-librarynetcdfnumpypythonnetcdf4
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