Dr Achim Basermann is head of the department “High-Performance Computing” at German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Simulation and Software Technology institute and German Research Foundation (DFG) review board member in computer science, topic “Massively Parallel and Data Intensive Systems”. In 2019, he became chairman of the strategy commission for national high-performance computing (NHR) in Germany. He coordinated the application workpackage in the European Grid computing project NextGRID (2004-2007), the pre- and postprocessing activities in the European Exascale computing project CRESTA (2011-2014) and the algorithmic research in the Exascale computing projects ESSEX I and II (2013-2018) of DFG. In 1995, he obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from RWTH Aachen followed by a postdoctoral position in Computer Science at Research Centre Jülich GmbH, Central Institute for Applied Mathematics. From 1997 to 2009 he led a team of HPC application experts at the C&C Research Laboratories, NEC Europe Ltd., in Sankt Augustin, Germany and contributed to the Japanese Earth Simulator project. Current research is focussed on massively parallel linear algebra algorithms, partitioning methods, optimization tools in the area of computational fluid dynamics for many-core architectures and GPGPU clusters, high-performance data analytics and quantum computing.