Keynote Speakers for ASHPC25 (in alphabetical order)
Dan Alistarh
Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), Klosterneuburg, Austria
Machine learning, distributed computing and energy efficient algorithm
Dan Alistarh is a Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Vienna. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor at MIT, a Researcher at Microsoft, and received his Ph.D. from EPFL. His research is on algorithms for efficient machine learning and high-performance computing, with a focus on scalable DNN inference and training, for which he received an ERC Starting Grant in 2018. In his spare time, he works with the ML research team at Neural Magic, a Boston-based startup, on making compression faster, more accurate and accessible to practitioners.
Sam Hatfield
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading, United Kingdom
Climate and numerical weather prediction, data assimilation and supercomputing
Sam Hatfield is a Computational Scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). He is closely involved in efforts to port the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), a numerical weather prediction code with a long history, to modern GPU-equipped supercomputers. This will enable ECMWF to perform kilometer-scale global Earth system simulations to better capture extreme weather events, a key goal of the Destination Earth initiative. Sam focuses his efforts in particular on the spectral transform kernel, fulfilled by ECMWF’s numerical library ecTrans, which can dominate the overall wall time for the IFS.
Alessaandro Laio
Theoretical and Scientific Data Science Group, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy
Computational molecular sciences and data analysis
Alessandro Laio is a Full Professor in the Department of Physics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, and consultant of the Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics group at ICTP. His recent research has focused on algorithmic developments in unsupervised learning, data clustering, metric learning and dimensionality reduction, while he has also made pioneering contributions to improving the ability of computer simulations to make predictions for complex systems. His name is usually associated with the groundbreaking algorithmic solutions for extracting essential features from complex data.
Erwin Laure
Technical University of Munich (TUM) / Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), Garching, Germany
Computer Science and parallel computing
Erwin Laure is the Director of the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF) of the MPG in Garching, Germany and Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. Before joining MPG he was Professor for High Performance Computing at KTH Stockholm and Director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing there. He holds a PhD from the University of Vienna and has more than 25 years years of experience in high performance computing, was a member of the EuroHPC Infrastructure Advisory Group, and was involved in major European exascale projects (e.g. the BioExcel Centre of Excellence for Biomolecular Simulations). His research interests include programming environments, languages, compilers and runtime systems for parallel and distributed computing, with a focus on exascale computing.
Jan Šuntajs
Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS), Ljubljana, Slovenia
Quantum Physics
Jan Šuntajs is a physicist specializing in quantum many-body systems, quantum chaos, and ergodicity breaking transitions, with extensive experience in high-performance computing for numerical simulations. He received his PhD in
in physics from at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. His thesis, Nonequilibrium and statistical properties of isolated quantum many-body systems, earned him the Jožef Stefan Institute Golden Emblem Prize. Jan is currently employed at the Department of Theoretical Physics (F1) at the Jožef Stefan Institute and at the Laboratory for Internal Combustion Engines and Electromobility (LICeM) at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Ljubljana. At LICeM, his research focuses on numerical simulations of batteries, particularly the coupling between chemical and elastomechanical properties, while his work at the Jožef Stefan Institute explores the boundaries of quantum chaos.
