Cluster/Grid Computing

Gerd Stolpmann offers the development of individual software, mostly in the area of cluster/grid environments. The focus is the design of the data and algorithmic architecture, which is especially important for getting the best performance in highly parallelized systems. My work is done when the basic blocks of the system have been designed and so far implemented that "normal" application developers can take over and build the application logic on top of these blocks.

Experience

In the past years, Gerd Stolpmann has been active in these areas:

Development of cluster/grid applications for text processing such as Internet crawlers, search engines, and distributed key/value databases.
System programming in order to create a solid foundation for cluster/grid applications, such as the Hydro RPC implementation
Programming in Ocaml because this results in fast and rock-solid software that never fails, the language attracts talented developers, and the time-to-market is low.
Performance tests and monitoring are the bread-and-butter parts of my work. Performance tests serve as quality assurance for the design, and monitoring has a similar role for the stability of the implementation.

From Darmstadt to the world

The primary work location is Darmstadt, Germany. Nevertheless I mostly have had international customers so far, coming from California, New York, and Italy. It is not fully clear to me why my business developed into this direction, but obviously the customers liked skills, knowledge and methodology they couldn't easily find on their local markets. The modern telecommunication technology makes it possible to continuously stay in contact with people in the whole world.

I have my own office in Darmstadt that does not only provide the usual SOHO equipment, but also rack computers, Gigabit Ethernet, and other datacenter devices I need for my area of development.

Customers

Some customers don't want to be mentioned. Here are the ones I can talk about:

Mylife.com, Los Angeles, California: an American ComScore-100 web site (2008-2009)
Wink Technologies, Inc., Los Altos, California: Web start-up from the Silicon Valley (2006-2008)
Dresdner Bank AG, Frankfurt, Germany: one of the nation-wide private banks in Germany (now merged with Commerzbank; 2005)