Sebastiano Fabio Schifano

Current Scientific Activity

My research activities are in the design of massively parallel architectures, and in the optimization of scientific-applications, mainly in the field of theoretical computational physics. Otherwise stated, my research has a degree of inter-disciplinarily, since I have taken a computer-science approach to solve heavy computational problems, such as the Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) to study interactions of elementary particles of the matter, the Lattice Boltzmann Methods (LBM) to study the behavior of fluids, and the Monte Carlo simulation of Spin systems to study ferro-magnetic systems, and disordered systems such as spin glasses. In the framework of this activities I have been a co-founder of the APE, JANUS, QPACE and COKA projects. More recently, I have being focused on the investigation of performances of recent multi- and many-core processors, including GPUs and Xeon-Phi, to investigate techniques to implement and optimize scientific applications able to exploit a large fraction of available peak-performance.

Summary of Professional Achievments 

Laurea in Computer Science from University of Pisa (Italy). I have been research associate first at Italian Research Council (CNR) and then at Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). Since 2006 I hold a permanent position as research associate in computer science at University of Ferrara in Italy. I have been involved in several European projects (APE, JANUS, QPACE, EU-FP7-HP2, EU-FP7-HP3, COKA) as task-leader and group-leader, focusing on development of high performance systems optimized for scientific applications like Lattice Gauge Theory (LQCD), Lattice Boltzmann and Spin-Glasses. Italian representative member of the « HPC in Europe Taskforce » (HET) initiative instrumental to the establishment of the PRACE research infrastructure. I’m author of 60+ publications including conference proceedings and journal papers, and 30+ presentations at international peer-reviewed conferences.

Mobility across Thematic Areas

Computer Science – High Performance Computing – Computational Physics – Big Data – Data Acquisition and Processing

Geographic Mobility

INFN (ITALY) – DESY and Juelich Supercomputing Center (GERMANY) – Barcelona Supercomputing Center (SPAIN) – CERN (SWISS)