Peter Sanders

Also known as Peter W. Sanders

Peter Sanders is a German computer scientist who builds fast algorithms for large data sets and parallel machines, from road-network route planning to the distributed SAT-solving platform Mallob. After studying at Karlsruhe University and earning his doctorate in 1996, he spent 1997 to 2004 at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and then took the Chair of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2004. He won the 2011 Baden-Württemberg Award for Applied Research for his route calculations, the 2012 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, and a 2020 ERC Advanced Grant for the ScAlBox project on scalable basic algorithms. With Dominik Schreiber he published the Mallob platform in 2022 and supervised Schreiber's thesis on parallel SAT solving, which he called an important step for symbolic artificial intelligence. He is a professor at KIT, where he leads the Algorithm Engineering Group, and he works part-time for Google.

Now at: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Google
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Timeline

1988–1996

Studies and PhD in Karlsruhe

He studies at Karlsruhe University from 1988 to 1996, with shorter stays at North Carolina State University and Chalmers University in Gothenburg. He receives his PhD in computer science from Universität Karlsruhe in 1996.
1997–2004

Max Planck, then a KIT chair

From 1997 to 2004, he does research at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and qualifies as professor at Saarland University in 2000. In 2004, he takes the Chair of Theoretical Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
2006–2008

Suffix arrays and Contraction Hierarchies

In 2006, he publishes Linear Work Suffix Array Construction in the Journal of the ACM with Juha Kärkkäinen and Stefan Burkhardt. In 2008, he coauthors Contraction Hierarchies: Faster and Simpler Hierarchical Routing in Road Networks with Robert Geisberger, Dominik Schultes and Daniel Delling, and the textbook Algorithms and Data Structures: The Basic Toolbox with Kurt Mehlhorn.
2011–2012

State research award and Leibniz Prize

He receives the 2011 Award of the State of Baden-Württemberg for Applied Research, worth EUR 100,000, for his research into route calculations. The DFG awards him the 2012 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, worth EUR 2.5 million, for his work on practice-oriented algorithm engineering.
2020

ERC grant for ScAlBox

The European Research Council funds his ScAlBox project, Engineering Scalable Algorithms for the Basic Toolbox, with an Advanced Grant in 2020. The project develops algorithms and software libraries for searching, sorting, queue administration, load distribution and communication between processes that scale to millions of processors working in parallel.
2022–2024

Mallob and scalable SAT solving

In 2022, he and Dominik Schreiber publish Mallob, a platform for scalable SAT solving on demand with decentralized job scheduling, in the Journal of Open Source Software. In 2024, Schreiber's thesis Scalable SAT Solving and its Application, supervised by Sanders at KIT, wins the German Informatics Society's dissertation prize and the Fahiem Bacchus Award. He calls the work an important step in the direction of parallel hardware for symbolic artificial intelligence.
As of October 2026

Algorithm Engineering Group at KIT

He leads the Algorithm Engineering Group in the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and works part-time for Google. At ACM PODC 2026 he gives the invited talk Parallel Algorithm Engineering Reconsidered, in which he describes AI assisted algorithm engineering as able to drive the cycle of modeling, design, analysis, implementation and experiments at unprecedented speed.