Fons Rademakers
Project Leader at CERN
Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFons Rademakers is a veteran software leader and project head with over 25 years driving high-performance data analysis and storage systems at CERN, including leading the ROOT project used worldwide in particle physics and instrumental in the Higgs discovery workflows. With a PhD in particle physics, he blends deep research pedigree and hands-on engineering—authoring column-wise ntuples, PIAF (sold to HP), and co-founding ROOT and BioDynaMo, an open-source agent-based simulator for biology and epidemiology. He has steered technology strategy as CERN openlab CTO/CRO and now leads CERN’s critical backup and disaster-recovery initiative, CBACK. An active contributor to core tooling like Cling and ROOT’s build systems, he combines parallel computing expertise (PROOF, TBB/IMT) with practical deployment experience across Linux and heterogeneous platforms. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic innovator who translates experimental computing needs into resilient, widely adopted infrastructure.
26 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Physics, PhD, Physics at University of AmsterdamBeta, Beta at Barlaeus Gymnasium
English, Dutch, French, Italian, German
Github Skills (20)
c-language10
multithreading10
build-system10
makefile10
rootkit10
compiler-options10
thread10
hyper-threading10
cplus10
compile10
compiler10
build-tools10
threaded10
cpp10
cprogramming-language10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
root-project/root
May 2000 - Jun 2022
The official repository for ROOT: analyzing, storing and visualizing big data, scientifically
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 9535 commits, 42 PRs in 22 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Fons primarily contributed to the build system and configuration of the ROOT project, a data analysis framework. Their work included modifying build scripts, particularly those related to the notebook executable, and the integration of TBB and IMT for threading. Additionally, they addressed code issues, like incorrect quotes, and corrected build configurations for different platforms. These changes reflect efforts to enhance the project's build process and incorporate new features.
pythonroot-cernmathematicsc-plus-plusscientific-visualization
vgvassilev/cling
Nov 2012 - May 2014
The interactive C++ interpreter Cling
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 commits in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Fons primarily contributed to the C++ interpreter "cling" by addressing build and compilation issues. They resolved problems related to compiler visibility settings, C++11 compatibility, and the integration with libc++. They also added support for the win64gcc architecture. Additionally, they worked on code related to text input functionality.
cppclangc-plus-plusjupytercling
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