Chris Broekema is a senior research staff member at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy since 2003. Over the years he has focused most of his work on compute- and data transport hardware design for radio astronomy. He has designed, built, procured, operated and worked on high-performance computing systems for the LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands, including some of the fastest supercomputers in the world at the time, since 2004. More recently his focus shifted to the computational and data-transport challenges in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), where he was responsible for the hardware platform design of the SKA Science Data Processor (SDP).
To support this work he has done applied research into compute- and data-transport systems. His focus is on the various system aspects that impact the sustainability, suitability and usability of current and emerging compute- and data-transport systems. He has published extensively and defended his PhD thesis on the subject in 2020. He served in various panels and review committees, most notably for the ASKAP science data processor and the ARTS system, and has presented his work numerous times, both nationally and internationally.