Special and Invited Speakers

Balaji Baktha

Special Talk: “Digital Autonomy and Sovereign Compute Infrastructure powered by RISC-V”

Balaji Baktha is the founder and CEO of Ventana Micro Systems, a leader in high-performance RISC-V processors. He is an experienced semiconductor executive and a serial technology entrepreneur and investor with a proven track record in founding and exiting several successful startups over more than 30 years in Silicon Valley. Balaji is a board member of RISC-V International as well as several other startups, and Limited Partner and Senior Advisor at PE and VC funds.

Prior to Ventana, Balaji was the founder and CEO of Veloce Technologies, the world’s first 64-bit ARM based high performance processor for cloud-compute (acquired by AppliedMicro). Before Veloce, Balaji was the VP and GM of the Communications Business at Marvell Semiconductor where he managed multiple product groups including compute, wired and wireless networking, and Enterprise Storage SoCs. Before Marvell, Balaji co-founded Platys, a startup that pioneered iSCSI storage networking and was subsequently acquired by Adaptec (now Microsemi). Prior to Platys, Balaji co-founded Shuttle Technologies (acquired by SCM Micro) to build the first digital media & storage I/O SoCs for Apple, Sony, and HP.

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Alvaro Vazquez-Mayagoitia

HPC + AI Talk: "Accelerating Autonomous Discovery in Chemistry and Materials with High Performance Computing

Álvaro Vázquez-Mayagoitia is an expert in computational and theoretical chemistry.  His experience spans both methods and applications of electronic structure theory with high-performance computing.

He joined the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in 2011, as part of an Early Science Program ALCF-2. In 2013, he accepted a position as part of the ALCF Computational Science team. As a member of that team, Alvaro actively participates in the continuous enhancement of features and performance of a number of quantum chemistry codes, including NWChem, BigDFT, Quantum-Espresso, MADNESS, and FHI-aims.

With the goal of efficiently using ALCF resources and accelerating simulations, he has worked on the optimization of codes and libraries for Argonne’s petascale systems, like Intrepid, Mira and Theta. At ALCF, he provides support, advice and training for scientific projects in fields related to physics and chemistry. Most recently, he has assisted in the preparation and review of proposals for grants sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Prior to joining ALCF, Alvaro held a postdoctoral position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee working with MADNESS and NWChem codes. He developed tools for molecular spectroscopy and evaluated weak interactions.

In addition to supporting teams participating in Early Science, INCITE and ALCC projects, Álvaro is collaborating with multiple projects in the ALCF Data Science Program that are deploying software for Machine Learning approaches and Complex Workflows to accelerate chemical and materials discovery. His work with these projects has contributed to advancements in predicting organic dyes to improve solar cells, and in the study of inner forces of molecular crystals with applications in medicine and electronics.

Álvaro also leads the ALCF Postdoctoral Committee, where he manages the recruitment and hiring of postdoctoral researchers to work on both computational science projects and software development efforts for next-generation  supercomputers. As part of this role, he is actively involved in mentoring ALCF postdocs to ensure they are developing the skills and experience needed to advance their careers.

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Daniel Janies

BioCARLA

In 2012, Daniel Janies joined the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as The Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics. Dr. Janies received a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Michigan in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1995. Dr. Janies worked as a postdoctoral fellow (1996-99) and as a principal investigator (2000-02) at the American Museum of Natural History where he led a team that, using off-the-shelf components, built one of the world’s largest computing clusters in 2001. Dr. Janies originated the field of mapping pathogen genetic data in concert with geography and host animals. Dr. Janies was a tenured faculty member in the College of Medicine at the Ohio State University where he served as a national principal investigator in the Tree of Life program of the NSF. Dr. Janies’ recent awards include DoD sponsored work to understand the spread of pathogens. Dr. Janies is an elected Director of the board of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. Dr. Janies has advised the Obama White House, the Pentagon, and testified to both Houses of Congress. In 2022, Janies was named Co-director for Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks 

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Daniel Janies

HPC Applications Talk: "High performance computing applications as applied to infectious diseases in the CIPHER center"

In 2012, Daniel Janies joined the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as The Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics. Dr. Janies received a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Michigan in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1995. Dr. Janies worked as a postdoctoral fellow (1996-99) and as a principal investigator (2000-02) at the American Museum of Natural History where he led a team that, using off-the-shelf components, built one of the world’s largest computing clusters in 2001. Dr. Janies originated the field of mapping pathogen genetic data in concert with geography and host animals. Dr. Janies was a tenured faculty member in the College of Medicine at the Ohio State University where he served as a national principal investigator in the Tree of Life program of the NSF. Dr. Janies’ recent awards include DoD sponsored work to understand the spread of pathogens. Dr. Janies is an elected Director of the board of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. Dr. Janies has advised the Obama White House, the Pentagon, and testified to both Houses of Congress. In 2022, Janies was named Co-director for Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks 

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Fabrizio Gagliardi

EuroHPCLatam Panel

Fabrizio Gagliardi is Distinguished Research Director at Polytechnic University of Barcelona (Spain), Senior Strategy Advisor at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and Chair of EUACM, ACM’s European policy committee. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa. Earlier in his career, he was Europe, Middle East and Africa Director for External Research at Microsoft Research Corporation. He joined Microsoft in November 2005 after a long career at CERN, the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. Gagliardi is author and co-author of several publications and articles on real-time and distributed computing systems.

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Fabrizio Gagliardi

Special Talk - EU and Latam collaboration on HPC. The experience of RISC2

Fabrizio Gagliardi is Distinguished Research Director at Polytechnic University of Barcelona (Spain), Senior Strategy Advisor at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and Chair of EUACM, ACM’s European policy committee. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa. Earlier in his career, he was Europe, Middle East and Africa Director for External Research at Microsoft Research Corporation. He joined Microsoft in November 2005 after a long career at CERN, the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. Gagliardi is author and co-author of several publications and articles on real-time and distributed computing systems.

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Guido Araujo

HPC Talk: "The OpenMP Cluster Programming Model"

Guido Araujo received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1997. He is a Full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering with UNICAMP. His research interests include code optimization, parallelizing compilers, and compiling for accelerators, explored in close cooperation with industry partners. He has published over 120 scientific papers and received five best paper awards. He was awarded two Inventor of the Year and two Zeferino Vaz Research Awards from UNICAMP. His students received two Best Ph.D. Thesis Awards from the Brazilian Computing Society. He was a member of the technical advisory board of Eldorado and SIDI R&D Institutes and the CI-Brasil Council at the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology. He co-founded the companies Kryptus and Idea! and is currently a member of the Editorial Board of IEEE MICRO.

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Dario Garcia Gasulla

HPC + IA: "When HPC met AI: An Unlikely yet Inevitable alliance"

Senior Researcher at BSC, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

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