Thomas Ludwig studied informatics and philosophy at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He finished in 1987 with a diploma in informatics and since then has worked in the field of high performance computing (HPC). From 1988 to 2001 Ludwig was conducting research at the Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany. He received a doctoral degree in 1992 and his habilitation degree in 1998. At TUM Ludwig had been developing tools for parallel computers. A focus was in particular on performance analysis tools and methodologies. In cooperation with the university hospital he deployed parallel computing in the field of computer tomography. In 2001 Ludwig became professor at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, Heidelberg. His computer science research was concentrated on storage of high data volumes. An important application field was bio-informatics, in particular, in cooperation with the Germany Cancer Research Centre. In 2009 Ludwig moved to Hamburg, Germany, and became the director of the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ). As a national institution DKRZ provides service to the German Earth System research community. It also interacts on an international basis with partner institutions like NCAR. In addition, Ludwig is a full professor for informatics at the Universität Hamburg. His research group has a strong focus on high performance data storage, and designs and implements tools that help to master the future step to exascale computing. A second focus is on energy efficiency with high performance computing. Finally, the group is active in Earth Sciences as an application field for HPC.

Thomas Ludwig combines his research efforts in HPC with his duties as a director of DKRZ by bringing new concepts for data storage into production mode for modern data intensive computational climate science. He has also a strong interest in theory of science. Numerical simulation as a means of finding new insights is being amplified by data intensive science, and data management with data analytics will lead to new ways of gaining knowledge. Informatics will leverage this transition which is known as the Fourth Paradigm. Ludwig´s research team as well as the data management group at DKRZ is conducting R&D in this exciting new field.

Ludwig is author and co-author of more than 100 publications. He frequently organizes conferences and workshops. In 2010 he started with the conference series “Energy-Efficient High Performance Computing” which tries to address the problem of using ever more energy for our computational intensive sciences, in particular also for climate science. Eventually, this could lead from Green IT to Green Science.