Gerhard Fasol: Software engineering

Gerhard Fasol started software development around 1972 first coding in HPL on Hewlett-Packard Desktop computers of Ruhr-University Bochum. Gerhard also coded in HPL for HP desktop computers later for experimental analysis during his PhD research work on time-resolved luminescence at Cambridge University (Cavendish Lab).

First high-level computer languages learnt and used: ALGOL and FORTRAN.

First major coding and software engineering project: creating a model for the heat/temperature regulation of the human body using systems of coupled differential equations. Designed and coded solving the coupled differential equations using finite difference methods, coded in FORTRAN and implemented on IBM360. (Research assistantship project at the Institute of Physiology, Dept of Medicine, Ruhr-University Bochum).

Gerhard created code for main frames, UNIX workstations, DEC PDP-11, Cray-Supercomputers, Mac-OS and several other systems.

Many scientific software projects to interpret and predict scientific experiments, including:

electronic band structure calculations, and simulation of ultrafast processes in semiconductors, including GaAs. Electronic band structure calculations using the k.p model
simulation of the vibrational spectra, and eigen-modes of complex crystals with very large unit cells, and layered structures. Later expanded at Cambridge University to study the vibrational properties and vibrational spectra of Si-Ge superlattices
simulating and visualizing electron wave propagation in nano-devices by solving the time-dependend Schroedinger equation. Some results of this work were awarded 2nd Prize in the Computer Visualization Contest of Japan’s Computer Graphics Association (優秀賞「KGT賞」『極小・超高速半導体デバイスを設計するための量子輸送シミュレーション』 ●Fasol Gerhard（ファーソル・ゲルハルト）東京大学生産技術研究所助教授), and won a mention in the Gordon Bell Prize for Parallel Processing. For details see here.
For these calculation Gerhard used a dual core HP-Unix workstation, for which one of his Cambridge PhD colleagues who had since joined HP had been involved in the IC and architecture design. With the help and cooperation of the HP designers of the HP-Unix workstation, Gerhard adapted the software to the memory structure of the HP-workstation, and used a number of other techniques, such as optimizing hard vs soft exception handling to accelerate the software execution speed by a factor of several hundred times.