LIACS >Kristian Rietveld

Dr. Kristian F. D. Rietveld

Assistant Professor, Systems and Security group

 

E-mail: k.f.d.rietveld(at)liacs.leidenuniv.nl     (or krietvel (at) liacs.nl)

Visiting address


Gorlaeus Gebouw Universiteit Leiden
Room BW3.03 (third floor, BW wing)
Einsteinweg 55
2333 CC Leiden
The Netherlands

Postal address


Leiden University, LIACS
P.O. Box 9512
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands

Research Interest

I am an Assistant Professor in the Systems and Security group at LIACS. My fascination for all kinds of techniques that improve the speed by which conputers can perform computations is fundamental to my teaching and research. More in partciular, my research interests are software performance analysis, software optimization, compiler techniques, code generation, system software, software security, many-core and GPU computing, Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPC and Cloud), and exploring novel architectures.

I study how computer systems, from small to large, are structured and how the performance of such systems can be improved. Performance optimization leads to more efficient use of (compute) resources, which not only reduces energy consumption, but also allows ever larger problems to be processed as such enabling new science for many disciplines. Within this context, I work on problems that are more fundamental in nature, such as generic program transformation techniques for automatic performance optimization, but also on more hands-on problems, for example performance optimization of scientific data processing workflows to help scientists obtain the results they need in less time. With my master students I have worked on various other problems in computer systems, which have also led to peer-reviewed publications, such as scanning RISC platforms for undocumented instructions and designing a compiler that is fully executed on the GPU.

Before turning to academia, I obtained professional experience as Lead Software Engineer and System Administrator. As software engineer, I am especially experienced in shared library maintenance (API and ABI compatibility) and working on open source software in open communities. In the past I have been a member of the GTK+ development team for over a decade.

PhD students

  • Miguel Blom
  • Jafar Akhoundali, with Olga Gadyatskaya
  • Wouter van den Berg
  • Quinten Cabo

Current courses

All my teaching activities can be found on the teaching page.

Thesis supervision

I supervise BSc and MSc projects in various areas of Computer Systems, from small (e.g., Raspberry Pi), many-core CPUs, GPUs, to large (HPC and Cloud Computing). Currently, I have open projects in the areas of Compiler Techniques, Code Generation, and Performance Analysis and Optimization of software stacks, scientific workflows and cloud infrastructure. If you are a student at Leiden University and interested in a thesis project, then contact me by e-mail to discuss possible thesis project topics.

Past thesis projects that I have (co-)supervised can be found in the LIACS thesis repository.

Academic Service

Program Committees and Journal Reviews

  • Program Committee Member The Third Workshop on Serverless, Extreme-Scale, and Sustainable Graph Processing Systems, co-located with EuroPar 2025
  • Program Committee Member ISC 2025 Birds of a Feather sessions
  • Program Committee Member ACM Computing Frontiers 2025
  • Program Committee Member CompSys @ ICT.OPEN 2025
  • External reviewer ICPP 2024
  • Program Committee Member CompSys 2024
  • Program and Poster Committee Membmer ACM Computing Frontiers 2024
  • Program Committee Member SHiPS23: 1st International Workshop on the Environmental Sustainability of High-Performance Software at SC23.
  • Program Committee Member CompSys 2023.
  • Program Committee Member ARRAY 2023 workshop at PLDI.
  • Program Committee Member 2nd Annual Compiler Frontiers Workshop (2023)
  • Reviewer for International Journal of Parallel Programming (IJPP), 2022
  • Program Committee Member HiPC 2022, HPC Track
  • Program Committee Member CompSys 2022.
  • Program Committee Member ACM Computing Frontiers 2022
  • Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing (TPDS), 2021
  • Reviewer for International Journal of Parallel Programming (IJPP), 2021
  • Program Committee Member HiPC 2021, HPC Track
  • Program Committee Member ACM Computing Frontiers 2021
  • Program Committee Member ACM Computing Frontiers 2020
  • Program Committee Member ACM Computing Frontiers 2019
  • Reviewer for ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), 2017

Conference organization

  • Special Session Co-Chair, ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, 2024
  • General Co-Chair, ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, 2023
  • Publicity Co-Chair, International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS) 2023
  • Member of the Steering Committee of the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, 2016 — present
  • Publications Co-Chair ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers 2020, 2021, 2022
  • Web Chair, ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers 2015 – 2020