Thomas Ludwig received the degree of the Diplom Informatiker from the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in April 1987 with a diploma thesis on Monte-Carlo simulations for computational fluid dynamics.

Together with professor Arndt Bode he changed 1988 to the Technische Universität München, Germany, where he was responsible for design and implementation of the Topsys project (tools for parallel systems). Major aspects of his work were the specification of the multitasking kernel functionality as well as the design of a load balancing system for the Intel iPSC/2 hypercube multiprocessor system. Within the framework of the load balancer project Thomas Ludwig was responsible for the development of the monitoring component, the decision component and the process migration mechanism.

He received the degree of the Doktor rer. nat. from the Technische Universität München in December 1992 with a thesis on dynamic load balancing systems for parallel computers.

Since that time his main effort is in the field of coupled workstations environments. Putting together experiences from the load balancer project and the Topsys project his focus is now on monitoring techniques for these target architectures. Within the framework of the OMIS project (on-line monitoring interface specification) a universal versatile interface is specified to connect any run-time tool (either interactive or automatic) to the monitoring system of the workstations. A major goal of the project is to eventually be able to have interoperable tools work concurrently with the same parallel program.

He is also active in the field of using parallel environments for application programming. Two focusses lie in the field of image reconstruction for computer tomography and parallel algorithms for phylogenetic analysis of sequences of gene data.

In July 1998 he received the degree of the Doktor rer. nat. habil. from the Technische Universität München with a thesis on the specification of an interface between on-line tools for parallel programming and their corresponding monitoring systems.

From February to July 1994 Thomas Ludwig taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, as an invited professor. From Oktober 1997 until September 1998 he had a temporary C3 professor position for system programming at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. From November 1998 until June 2000 he had a temporary C3 professor position for parallel computer architectures at the Technische Universität München.

Thomas Ludwig became a professor at the Universität Heidelberg in April 2001 and is now head of the group for parallel and distributed systems. His current research focus is in the field of high performance parallel input/output systems for cluster environments. His group develops tools for performance analysis of I/O systems as well as methods to improve the I/O bandwith in compute clusters.