Silvano de Gennaro
CERN
Education & Technology Transfer Division
1211 Geneva 23
Switzerland

Tel: +4122.767.4678
Fax: +4122.767.3540

E-mail: Silvano.de.Gennaro@cern.ch
WWW: www.cern.ch/VENUS/home_pages/silvano.html
Born on October 29, 1952 in Molfetta, Italy.
Italian citizen. Married.

[Production][Research] [Lectures] [Publications] [Employment] [Education] [Languages]

Multimedia Production

Jan. 2000 - now
Leader of the LIVEfromCERN project at CERN. This is a task force including staff from other divisions and groups. Its purpose is to develop multimedia products for CERN Education and Communication programme. In particular, LIVEfromCERN produces scientific information through videos, live webcasts, CDs and DVDs, posters and 3D animations.

Research and Development

Jan. 1994 - 1999
Leader of the VENUS (Virtual Environment Navigation in the Underground Sites) project at CERN. VENUS is a pilot project whose mandate is to apply powerful visualization techniques to improve the efficiency of design and communication of the world's future largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. VENUS' programme covers nearly all fields of Virtual Reality, including Virtual Prototyping of the accelerator and its detectors, Assembly Planning for verification and assembly optimization, Territory Modelling for visual and architectural integration, Telepresence Operations for robotic operations in hazardous areas, and finally Media and Image material production for internal and external communication. Within the VENUS project I also developed ideas and proposed solutions for the development of a Crane Simulator for training and assembly planning, and of a Collaborative Microrobotic environment for internal electronic maintenance of the LHC detectors. During the early developement phases of the World Wide Web, I was involved in discussions with the W3 author, Tim Berners-Lee, in view of developing an interface to carry VR models over the Web. A year later, In collaboration with CRS4 VENUS promoted the production i3D, the first and yet unrivalled VR web browser.

Jan. 1990 - Dec. 1993
Software Engineering for VAX/VMS and OpenVMS. Responsibilities included monitoring system performance and developing system surgery, optimization and administration tools for over 600 VMS stations at CERN. Amongst the results, I proposed and implemented a Mod to the VMS Scheduler that doubled the interactive responsiveness in overload situations, a Bootstrap Parallelization scheme that used VMS multitasking power to shorten lenghty customized boots by as much as 60%, a "Lock Manager" administration utility, enabling system managers to quickly dignose and solve on-line complex deadlock situations that would normally require a system shutdown, a Multicluster Management scheme, allowing one system manager to adminster several VMSClusters at once, like mirror images, and finally a technical proposal for a Class Oriented CPU Scheduler developed in a Joint Project with the VMS Developement HQ in Nashua (NH), which was implemented in VMS V6.0.

Jan. 1985 - Dec. 1990
VAX/VMS System Analysis and Administration, involving responsibilities for running the CERN central VMS facility, a large VAX/VMS mainframes cluster.

Sep. 1977 - Dec. 1984
System Analysis and Development on Control Data (CDC) mainframes. Competences involved responsibility for areas of disk, tape management, interaction and networking. During this period I proposed and implemented a number of extensions to SCOPE 3 and NOS/BE, amounting to over 2000 lines of assembly code and 12000 lines of Fortran and Pascal. Amongst these, a few world "premieres" such as a Hierarchical File Management system, a Multiple Disk Sets scheme, a Permanent File Control system and a Terminal Concentrator based on a DEC/LSI11, for which we had to write the Operating System too.

Tutorials and Lectures

VENUS project and Virtual Reality

Publications

VENUS project and Virtual Reality

Employment


From Sep. 77
Systems Analyst at CERN (European Organization for Particle Physics Research), Geneva.

Education

Jul. 1977
Degree of Dottore in Scienze dell'Informazione (Computer Science Ms.) from Università degli Studi di Bari (Italy) The thesis on "File base administration and optimization" was written during a summer student stage at CERN.

Dec. 1970
High School diploma in Classical Studies and Ancient Cultures.

Languages

Italian Mother tongue.
English Fluent, read, written, and spoken.
French Fluent, read, written, and spoken.
Spanish Read, spoken.

Back Home