IBM Research – Zurich is one of IBM’s 12 global research labs, the first established in Europe in 1956. As the first European branch of IBM Research, the mission of the IBM Research – Zurich Lab, in addition to pursuing cutting-edge research for tomorrow’s information technology, is to cultivate close relationships with academic and industrial partners, be one of the premier places to work for world-class researchers, to promote women in IT and science, and to help drive Europe’s innovation agenda.

Contribution to OPRECOMP

The project coordinator IBM leads WP1 and is responsible for management and coordination  of the entire project. IBM leads the kW architecture design in WP4 and its consequent demonstration in WP8. Moreover, IBM leads the applications development in WP7, and contributes to the design of transprecision algorithms in WP5.

Team

Dr. Costas Bekas

Manager Foundations of Cognitive Solutions

Dr. Bekas received B. Eng., Msc and PhD diplomas, all from the Computer Engineering & Informatics Department, University of Patras, Greece, in 1998, 2001 and 2003 respectively. In 2003-2005, he worked as a postdoctoral associate with Professor Yousef Saad at the Computer Science & Engineering Department, University of Minnesota, USA. Dr. Bekas’s main focus is in HPC systems and their impact in everyday life, science and business. His research agenda spans large-scale analytics with an emphasis in graph algorithms/DBs, numerical and combinatorial algorithms, energy aware and fault tolerant systems/methods and computational science. Dr. Bekas brings more than 10 years of experience in high performance computing. During the past several years he has been very active in the field of energy aware HPC and new computing paradigms and architectures as well as the effects of inexact arithmetic and demonstrating their impact in HPC and large scale industrial problems with an emphasis in analytics applications. Dr. Bekas was a recipient of the 2012 Prace Award and the 2013 and 2015 ACM Gordon Bell prizes.

He is the principal Investigator of the OPRECOMP project.

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Dr. Cristiano Malossi

Research Staff Member, Foundations of Cognitive Solutions

Cristiano Malossi received his B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering and his M.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2004 and 2007, respectively. After working one year on computational geology problems in collaboration with ENI, he moved to Switzerland where in 2012 he got his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), with a thesis focused on the development of algorithms and mathematical methods for the numerical simulation of cardiovascular problems. After winning the IBM Research Prize for his PhD thesis, in July 2013 Cristiano joined IBM Research – Zurich in theFoundations of Cognitive Solutions group. Cristiano is a recipient of the 2015 ACM Gordon Bell Prize and 2016 IPDPS Best Paper Award.

His main research interests include: High Performance Computing, Energy-Aware Algorithms and Architectures, Deep Neural Networks, Graph Analytics, Numerical Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Aircraft Design, Computational Geology, and Cardiovascular Simulations.

He is the Scientific Project Representative and coordinator of the OPRECOMP project.

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Dr. Christoph Hagleitner

Manager Accelerator Technologies group

Dr Hagleitner received his Masters and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich in 1997 and 2002, respectively. The main focus of his research are high-performance and energy-efficient hardware accelerators for business and high-performance computing applications. His research agenda spans topics from novel computing paradigms (e.g., NEM switches for logic applications) to application-level acceleration (e.g., text analytics acceleration for the processing of unstructured documents). He has authored and co-authored 80+ papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings and written/edited several book chapters.

He leads the design of the kW architecture in OPRECOMP.

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Florian Scheidegger

Florian Scheidegger achieved a Master of Science ETH in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology in 2017 with a main focus on software and hardware development for high performance data processing applications. I worked for five months at the Integrated Systems Laboratory of ETH developing a spatio-temporal video pipeline in first part, followed by a work that uses Neuronal Nets to classify videos. In January 2017, I started as PhD at IBM research Zürich for the OPRECOMP project.

He leads IBM’s effort in OPRECOMP WP7 and WP5, defining micro-benchmarks and developing transprecision aware algorithms.

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Dr. Dionysios Diamantopoulos

Dionysios Diamantopoulos received his Diploma of Engineering in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2009 and his Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2015, with a thesis, focused on rapid system prototyping and automated synthesis of many-accelerator heterogenous SoCs. During his Ph.D. studies, he was affiliated with the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), Greece, where he served as a researcher in several research projects from EU and European Space Agency (ESA). After his Ph.D, he worked as a SoC architect for a startup company, in the area of IoT/V2V/V2X communications. In 2017, he joined IBM as a Post-Doc Researcher at the Heterogeneous Cognitive Computing Systems Group, IBM Zurich. His research interests include Transprecision & Energy-Aware Computing, Deep Learning & Machine Learning, Reconfigurable Architectures, On-chip Interconnection Networks, Hardware-Software Codesign and High-Level-Synthesis.

He leads IBM’s effort in OPRECOMP WP4: Design and implementation of the kW architecture prototype.

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Dr. Heiner Giefers

Heiner received his diploma degree in computer science and his PhD degree in computer engineering from the University of Paderborn, Germany in 2006 and 2012, respectively. After his PhD he held a position as technical consultant for FPGA-accelerated high-performance computing at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2 ). In 2013 he joined the Accelerator Technologies group at IBM Research – Zurich. He has a particular interest in energy-efficient computing, reconfigurable architectures, on-chip interconnection networks, and hardware-software codesign.

He was responsible of IBM’s effort in OPRECOMP WP4 during the first year of the project.