Dr. Flavio Vella is an Associate Professor at the Information Engineering Computer Science Department at the University of Trento, a member of the management board of the national HPC laboratory at the National Inter-University Consortium for Informatics (CINI) and a Steering Committee Member of the spoke4 of the ICSC National Research Centre for High-Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing in Italy. His research interests span from parallel algorithms for emerging computing systems to systems for machine learning and quantum computing, with a focus on irregular and sparse computation and large-scale graph analysis.
Dr. Vella received his Ph.D. degree in 2017 from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Before joining the University of Trento, he was an assistant professor at the Free University of Bozen, a Postdoctoral fellow at CNR Italy, and an academic guest at ETH Zurich. Dr. Vella has gained industrial experience as a Research Engineer at Dividiti (UK) and as an intern at NVIDIA (US).
He served the HPC community in different roles, such as Artifact co-chair of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming and Computing Frontiers, workshop chair at the IEEE eScience IEEE International Conference on eScience, and social media chair at the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). He is also a PC member of many conferences, including IPDPS, SC and EuroPAR, among others. He has also been a guest editor of the Parallel Computing Journal (PARCO).
Dr. Vella and his team are actively participating in multiple EU projects focused on HPC and AI acceleration. One of these projects is ARCHYTAS (ARCHitectures based on unconventional accelerators for dependable and energy-efficient AI Systems), funded under the EDF-2023-RA-DIGIT-HAAI call. In this initiative, Dr. Vella serves as a member of the Scientific and Management boards and is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the University of Trento. He is also involved in NET4EXA (Network for European Exascale Systems), a project under HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-INTER-02. As part of this initiative, Dr. Vella is a member of the Technical Management Board and serves as the PI for the University of Trento. The project focuses on developing networking solutions and infrastructure for future European exascale computing systems, ensuring high-performance, scalability, and energy efficiency.
Dr. Vella has a strong record of scholarly publications with over 40 papers in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals. He has received important awards, including the Best Paper Award and Best PhD Paper Award at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC22, SC24) in 2022 and 2024, and Ph.D. Forum Poster Awards at IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS17). He also received an honourable mention as a runner-up for the Meta Research Award, Network for AI (2022), and the Facebook AI System Hardware/Software Co-Design Research Awards (2019).