Outline

In Episode 12, we interviewed Kenneth Hoste, who is an HPC system administrator at Ghent University in Belgium. We talked about the problems that arise when installing scientific software on HPC systems and how the EasyBuild project that originated at HPC-UGent helps dealing with those problems, the impact of open source software in scientific research, as well as the yearly FOSDEM open source software meeting in Brussels where he is actively involved in various ways.

About Kenneth Hoste :

Kenneth Hoste, a.k.a. ‘boegel’, is a computer scientist and Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) enthusiast from Belgium. He holds a Masters (2005) and PhD (2010) in Computer Science from Ghent University. His dissertation topic was “Analysis, Estimation and Optimization of Computer System Performance Using Machine Learning”.

Since October 2010, he is a member of the HPC team at Ghent University (Belgium) where he is mainly responsible for user support & training. As a part of his job, he is also the lead developer and release manager of EasyBuild, a software build and installation framework for (scientific) software on High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.

In his free time, he is a family guy and a fan of loud music, frequently attending gigs and festivals. He enjoys helping people & sharing his expertise, and likes joking around. He has a weak spot for stickers.

For more details, we refer to his social media: