In memoriam, Sven Öberg

In memoriam,

Sadly, our dear friend and for many years our colleague Sven Öberg recently passed away.

Since the establishment of the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) in 1996, Sven was HPC2N application expert and contact person at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), assignments he left less than two years ago. His deep expertise and vast experiences have been important for the continued development of HPC2N as a national center within the Swedish Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), not the least for identifying, introducing and supporting new researchers and fields into high performance computing.

At LTU, Sven was still active as professor emeritus in both research and supervision in the fields of applied physics and scientific and technical computations. He was an important source of inspiration for many students and colleagues.

A major part of Sven’s research involved developing efficient methods and high performance software for first-principles calculations on large atomic systems (1000 atoms or more), based on Density-Functional Theory (DFT), with applications mostly on defects in semiconductors, but also on nanostructures and biochemical molecules. Indeed, Sven pioneered and developed vector-parallel software for density functional theory computations, which led to great international recognition. Research results from Sven and his collaborators, both national and international, appear in a vast number of scientific publications.

We will miss Sven a lot, his inspiration as a valuable colleague and great friend gives us positive memories and guidance for the future.

Colleagues at HPC2N through
Bo Kågström, Director and Professor