Dimitri Komatitsch was one of the founding members of Magique3D. He helped guide the team during its initial four years until his departure towards Toulouse and then Marseille. As a CNRS director of research, he was a member of l’Institut Universitaire de France from 2007 to 2012. He was an internationally renowned geophysicist, and his reputation touches a wide range of disciplines going from applied mathematics to informatics. One among his many great contributions was the software SPECFEM that he developed, which has been regularly used for the simulation of earthquakes to analyze aftershock risks, and for the imaging of geophysical phenomena on global Earth scale. He also played a major role in the development of the Perfectly Matched Layers technique and their stabilization. Dimitri was awarded the Gorgon Bell prize in 2003 and the Bull Joseph Fourier in 2010, which are resounding facts of his impact in the community of High Performance Computing. Dimitri passed away on Monday January 21 in 2019 at the age of 48. Members of Magique3D have lost a visionary, a brilliant colleague, and above all, a friend. We extend our deepest and most sincere condolences to his family.
