Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya is a higher education institution specialized in the areas of architecture, sciences and engineering. Its main campus is located in Barcelona, Spain. It was funded in 1971. It has 23 faculties and 42 departments. Around 30000 undergraduate students are currently enrolled, in addition to 2500 master students and 3000 PhD students. It has around 2500 professors.
High Performance Computing research group
The High Performance Computing research group of the Computer Architecture Department at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya is the leading research group in Europe in topics related to high performance processor architectures, runtime support for parallel programming models, and performance tuning applications for supercomputing. The HPC group counts with 64 full-time members and 40 PhD students. Over the last 5 years, the group has published over 250 papers in refereed international conferences, and 20 PhD theses. Former members of the HPC group can be found in leading Spanish universities and research groups in Intel and HP.
Directly derived from the research effort at the Computer Architecture Department, the CEPBA (European Center for Parallelism in Barcelona) was funded in 1991 to offer supercomputing resources to the research community, and as a development center for computing technology products useful to industry. In 2000, IBM joins forces with CEPBA and forms the CIRI (CEPBA-IBM Joint Lab) in Barcelona, to strengthen relationships between IBM and UPC researchers in computer architecture. Also in 2000, Compaq' Vax Systems ands Servers Advanced Design division (VSSAD) establishes a laboratory in Barcelona (BSSAD) to benefit from the experience of UPC researchers in processor design. In 2002, with the acquisition of Alpha technology by Intel, the Compaq lab becomes an Intel lab, and expands to include an advanced research group in their Microprocessor Research Labs division (MRL) in addition to the advanced development group already installed. In 2004 the Spanish and Catalan governments sign an agreement with IBM to buy the MareNostrum Supercomputer, and extend the operations of CIRI to become the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). As of 2012, BSC has installed a new version of the MareNostrum supercomputer, which will mutiply by 10 its computational power, based on the IBM IDataPlex technology and up to 6000 Intel SandyBridge chips.
Xavier Martorell
Xavier Martorell received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalunya (UPC) in 1991 and 1999, respectively. He has been an associate professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC since 2001, teaching on operating systems. His research interests cover the areas of paralellism, runtime systems, compilers and applications for high-performance multiprocessor systems. Since 2005 he is the manager of the team working on Parallel Programming Models at the Barcelona Super Computing Center. He has participated in several european projects dealing with parallel environments (Nanos, Intone, POP, SARC, ACOTES). He is currently participating in the ENCORE, Mont-Blanc and DEEP European Projects, and the HiPEAC3 Network of Excellence.