Matthias Kretz began programming in primary school and got serious with C++ when he joined the development of the KDE 2 Desktop in its Alpha stages. Working on different GUI applications at first; moving on to library work all over the KDE core infrastructure. He studied Physics in Heidelberg, Germany and got into SIMD for his thesis. There he worked on porting parts of the online-reconstruction software for a CERN experiment to the Intel Larrabee GPU (discontinued - predecessor of AVX512). This motivated his work on SIMD and Vc, an abstraction for expressing data-parallelism via the type system. Vc was the first solution of this kind released as free software. His PhD in computer science at the University of Frankfurt was a continuation of his SIMD work, developing higher level abstractions and vectorization of challenging problems. Matthias has been contributing his SIMD work and his expertise in HPC and scientific computing in the C++ committee since 2013. Since 2022 he is chair of SG6 Numerics of the C++ committee. He is also a contributor to GCC and has founded and chaired C++ User Groups at Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and at GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research.
Catch Matthias Kretz in the following episode:
