Xavier Saez Pous

Primary tabs

Biography

I am graduated in Computer Engineering at Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2003. During the studies I specialised in the following areas: operating systems, computer architectures, data bases and computer visualization.

From 2003 to 2007 I was a scholarship holder in CEPBA-IBM Research Institute (CIRI). I participated with IBM in projects focused on the PowerPC970 processor, such as the development of ESSL (mathematical) library using the vectorial VMX intrinsics, and the porting of several scientific applications (eg BLAST, BLAT,  CLUSTALW, CPMD, FASTA and HMMER) to this architecture.

In 2006 I joined to Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in the Computer Applications in Science & Engineering department (CASE).  My thesis for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology at UPC in 2016 was based on my research at BSC on particle-in-cell algorithms for plasma simulations on heterogeneous architectures.

Over the years in BSC, I have built experience in the analysis the parallel performance of scientific applications and in the implementation of solutions to the detected bottlenecks, such as the improvement of the communication scheduling of the ELSA code (AIRBUS), which is a software dedicated to numerical simulation of single-species laminar or turbulent compressible flows. I have also collaborated with the Fusion Theory group (CIEMAT) on the development of the EUTERPE code, which is a code dedicated to simulations of fusion plasma instabilities, under the PRACE project.

Furthermore, I have developed hybrid version of codes to take advantage of all the levels of parallelism that a multicore architecture offers (eg ALYA and EUTERPE) and leverage the power of new heterogeneous architectures (GPUs) using the OpenCL language and the OmpSs programming model under the Mont-Blanc project.

During the last eight years I have collaborated in various projects with fusion plasma physicists. For instance, EUFORIA, ETSF or since 2014 I have worked under the Work Package on Code Development (WPCD) within the Heating and Current Drive group.

Finally, I am a member of the High Level Support Team (HLST) since 2015, whose main mission is to provide support to scientists from all Research Units of the EUROfusion consortium for the development and optimization of codes to be used on supercomputers.

My research is interested in allowing the extension of the physics simulated in fusion codes through exploiting available HPC resources.

Main Research Lines