Meet our speakers! We gratefully acknowledge the precious support provided from CINECA
Massimo Cafaro
Italo Epicoco
Marco Pulimeno
Alessandro Marani
Caterina Caravita
Antonio Costantini
Nitin Shukla
Massimo Cafaro
Massimo Cafaro is Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering for Innovation of the University of Salento. His research covers Parallel and Distributed Computing, Cloud and Grid Computing, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data, Security and Cryptography. He received a Laurea degree (MSc) in Computer Science from the University of Salerno and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bari. He is the Director of the Master in Applied Artificial Intelligence and head of the HPC Lab and AIMA (AI Models and Algorithms) Lab at the University of Salento. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society, Senior Member of the ACM, Vice Chair of Regional Centers and Coordinator of the Technical Area on Data Intensive Computing for the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing. He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Access, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and experience, and MDPI Future Internet, and as a moderator for the IEEE TechRxiv preprint repository ("Computing and Processing" category). He is the author of more than 130 refereed papers and holds a patent on distributed database technologies. He focuses his research on High Performance and Distributed computing on both theoretical and practical aspects, in particular the design and analysis of sequential, parallel and distributed algorithms.
Italo Epicoco
Italo Epicoco is an Associate Professor at University of Salento, Lecce, Italy. He received a Ph.D. in Computational Engineering at the University of Lecce. He is a principal scientist at Advanced Digital Innovation Center (ADIC) of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). His research interests include Data Mining, Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms. The principal application domains include Earth system modelling, Climate impacts, Automotive, Health. He is also expert on distributed and parallel computing on heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures.
Marco Pulimeno
Marco Pulimeno is an associate professor at the University of Salento, Italy, where he obtained his PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science. His research interests include high-performance computing, distributed computing, and data mining. He has published articles on data mining and parallel and distributed data mining in several specialised journals and conference proceedings.
Alessandro Marani
Alessandro Marani has a Master Degree in Mathematics. Since 2011, he works as a member of the HPC User Support staff at CINECA, where his focus is on production aspects such as sanity checks, benchmarks and scheduler priority tuning. He also co-operates with OGS, italian institute of Oceanography, for the development of a workflow related to biogeochemistry modeling and forecasting of the Mediterranean Sea. At CINECA, he is in charge of the annual HPC Course of Introduction to Parallel Programming with MPI and OpenMP. He is also active in many dissemination activities such as school visits and the European Night of Researchers.
Caterina Caravita
Caterina Caravita has got a PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Bologna, with a thesis about analytical and numerical models of stellar dynamics in galaxies, then she joined the CINECA HPC User Support and Production team. She is in particular responsible for the support to the Astrophysics community, through agreements with the INAF National Institute and the GAIA ESA project, and through the SPACE European Centre of Excellence. She is also in charge for dedicated first-level support to LLM projects on Leonardo supercomputer. Besides, she is involved in many teaching and dissemination activities related to Science and HPC.
Antonio Costantini
Antonio had received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Salento, with a thesis on High Energy Particle Physics. He worked as a postdoc at the University of Salento for a year, and then he moved to INFN Bologna for a two-year postdoc, where he continued his research on Elementary Particle Physics, focusing on models beyond the Standard Model and their numerical simulations. Antonio joined the CP3 group at Université Catholique de Louvain for a year, where he contributed to an upgrade of the MadGraph software, used for event generation in High Energy Physics. Afterward, he worked as a High School professor in Informatics before joining CINECA's Data Management group.
Nitin Shukla
Nitin Shukla received an MSc in Physics Engineering and a PhD in Computational Plasma Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico, Department of Physics, Lisbon, Portugal. He is currently a High-Performance Computing analyst at the CINECA supercomputing centre in Bologna, Italy, where he works on the development and deployment of parallel codes for modern HPC architectures.
He leads the astroplasma physics research activities at CINECA and coordinates the SPACE Centre of Excellence EU project. He is principal investigator of the TRY21 project on porting the plasma code ECsim to GPUs using OpenACC and is a co-developer of the CUDA version of the XShell code within the H2020 ChEESE project. He is also DevTeam member of the project DESTINE for optimisating, performing analysis of the code RAPS20.
In addition, he serves as a technical referee for national and international HPC calls and convenes training courses on CUDA, OpenACC, Julia and OpenMP.