About us¶
We are members of the High-Performance Computing & Visualization (HPCV) group at SURF, and are based in Amsterdam. SURF is a cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions in which the members combine their strengths to acquire or develop digital services, and to encourage knowledge sharing through continuous innovation.
Within the HPCV group we support users of the Dutch National compute infrastructure with visualization expertise and software development, on topics such as data visualization, remote visualization, 3D modeling and rendering and use of eXtended Reality (XR) for research and education.
Part of our jobs is to provide courses on topics related to visualization in HPC. This Blender course was originally created for the PRACE Training Center and first provided (in-person) in 2018, and has since been repeated at least once a year. The course is currently organized as part of the EuroCC The Netherlands training activities.
Paul Melis¶
Paul Melis has an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Twente in The Netherlands and worked on topics in scientific visualization and VR at the University of Groningen and University of Amsterdam before joining SURFsara in 2009 (which has since become part of SURF).
At SURF he is involved in several activities related to visualization, including realizing visualization projects for end-users, teaching courses and providing user support for visualization tasks on our HPC systems. As part of the SURF innovation portfolio he is involved in the use of extended reality (XR) for research and education. He likes to use Blender for all things 3D, but also works with ParaView, and sometimes develops a bit of code in Python, C++ or Julia.
Casper van Leeuwen¶
Casper has a MSc in Computer Science from Delft University of Technology where he graduated on the topic of medical visualization. He has been at SURFsara since 2014.
He mainly works on web-based 2D/3D visualization, including Jupyter Notebooks and loves to work on Blender projects when the goal is to make something look aesthetic! Besides that he also knows his way around Unity and Unreal Engine.
Ben de Vries¶
Ben de Vries has a PhD in Astrophysics from KU Leuven. He joined SURF in 2019. He focuses on 2D/3D visualization projects using Blender, Unity and general 3D programming.