Full professor founded the first national parallel computing service 30 years ago

The jubilation ceremony for Alberto Proença, full professor at the Department of Computer Science of the School of Engineering of the University of Minho (DI-EEUM), took place on 14 June in auditorium B1 (building 2) of the Gualtar campus in Braga.

The ceremony was opened by the UMinho rector, Rui Vieira de Castro, the president of the EEUM, Pedro Arezes, and the director of the DI, Luís Soares Barbosa. This was followed by a series of testimonies from people, some of them prominent, who had worked with the honoured man. Alberto Proença’s last lecture took place at 5pm and an hour later there was an opportunity for socialising.

Alberto José Proença was born in Mozambique in 1954 and came to Portugal in 1975. He graduated in Coimbra and did his doctorate in Manchester (UK). He is lecturer no. 43 at UMinho (1977-), where he is also a researcher at the Algoritmi Centre, researching everything from digital electronics to high-performance computing, including computer architecture, parallel computing and heterogeneous computing, with applications in the areas of heritage, computer vision, physics and chemistry.

Alberto Proença introduced the first national parallel computing service (1994), chaired UMinho’s Computer Centre and launched the Erasmus Programme for the exchange of teachers and students with the University of Bristol (UK) in the fields of parallel computing and computer vision. He also chaired the Advanced Computing area in the cooperation programme between the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and universities in Portugal and has led the university’s teaching and research services in parallel computing with the SeARCH heterogeneous computer cluster since 2005.

Thank you, Professor Proença, and see you again!