ABOUT ME AND HPC


The world and humanity represent to me the greatest high performance system alive and the parallelism and distribution therein fascinate me for the last almost two decades. I am excited to study a multitude of issues and challenges evolving around the optimal use of parallel and distributed computing resources to solve important computational problems in science, engineering, and society. Below is a reverse chronological account of my professional appointments and education, as well as selected highlights about my scholarly activities.

I head the High Performance Computing (HPC) research group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel, which I joined in August 2015 as an Assistant Professor. In August 2020, I was promoted to and tenured as Associate Professor. My work revolves around the parallelization (mapping, scheduling, load balancing), robustness, and scalability of scientific applications executing on parallel computing systems across multiple levels and hierarchies of parallelism, as well as improving the efficiency of HPC operations and research in HPC methods via (monitoring and) operational data analysis

Prior to 2015, I was with the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) which I joined in 2010 as a post-doctoral research associate and later as a senior scientist (tenured). My work there involved modeling and simulation of highly adaptive energy-efficient computing (HAEC) systems, as well as research on state-of-the-art robust and scalable scheduling and dynamic load balancing techniques for optimizing the performance of scientific applications.

Between 2008 and 2010 I was a post-doctoral research associate at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems at Mississippi State University. My research there involved, among others, designing and developing methodologies for the computational performance optimization of multi-scale simulation codes from Materials Science using state-of-the-art scheduling and dynamic load balancing techniques and advanced tracing and profiling tools.

In 2008 I was awarded a doctoral degree in Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Under the guidance of Prof. George Papakonstantinou (Head and Founder of the Computing Systems Laboratory), I conducted research in parallel and distributed computing and made contributions to the field by designing algorithms for static and dynamic scheduling and load balancing of scientific applications.

In the spring of 2002, I was accepted into the graduate study program of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, to pursue a doctoral degree. The entry into this graduate program followed after a one-semester Erasmus exchange program upon my graduation from the University of Oradea, Romania.

I received my Diploma in Computer Engineering (equivalent to bachelor’s and master’s) in 2001 from the Department of Electrotechnics and Informatics at the University of Oradea, Romania.

I was born and raised in Zalău, a small city in the northwest of Romania, a beautiful and underestimated country in Eastern Europe.

I have authored and co-authored one invited book chapter and over 70 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops. Together with co-authors, I won best paper awards at the Cluster (2019), IPDPSW ParLearning (2014), ICPDC (2014), and ISPDC (2011), and had a top-ranked paper at ISPDC (2019).

I serve as an associate editor for ACM’s TOPC and Elsevier’s FGCS journals, and as an organizer of various parts of the technical program and technical program committee member in several international conferences and workshops (e.g., SC, IPDPS, Euro-Par, ICPP, ISPDC, PASC, etc.). I also serve as a reviewer in several international journals (e.g., IEEE TPDS, Elsevier JPDC, Elsevier FGCS, etc.). I have co-organized the 45th SPEEDUP workshop, was general co-chair of the PASC18 conference, program chair of IPDPSW HCW2020, general chair of IPDPS HCW2021 and ISPDC 2022, technical program co-chair of ICPP 2022, as well as the co-organizer of the MODA workshop series (started in 2020) with ISC HPC.

I am a professional member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society as well as of several IEEE Communities (e.g., Big Data, Cloud Computing, Rebooting Computing), a lifetime and senior member of ACM, and of several SIGs (e.g., SIGHPC, SIGSIM, SIGCOMM, SIGACT), a member of the HiPEAC network, as well as a member of the Swiss Informatics Society, the Research Network Computational Sciences and Research Network Responsible Digital Society at the University of Basel. In 2021 I was elected as a member of the Strategy Committee of the German National HPC Association and in 2019 in the Scientific Advisory Board of the Division calcul et soutien à la recherche, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

My HPC group is also representing the University of Basel in the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) Consortium, a member of the High Performance Group (HPG), contributed to the latest SPEChpc 2021 Benchmark Suites, and Research Group (RG). We are also members of the MLperf and MLperf-HPC working group for developing fair and useful benchmarks for measuring training and inference performance of machine learning hardware, software, and services.

An up-to-date curriculum vitae is available upon request.

Selected open-access articles I have (co-)authored can be found on arXiv.org and on HAL-Inria.

 

Digital presence

ACM Digital library author page: here.
IEEE Xplore Digital Library author page: here.
DBLP author page: here.
ResearcherID D-1517-2009: here.
ORCID 0000-0002-2773-4499: here.
Scopus Author ID 6504210411: here.
Google Scholar profile: here.
* LinkedIn profile: here.
Twitter profile: @cflorina.
HiPEAC profile: cflorina.

Media Coverage

* 2024: PrimeNews UniBâle Podcast, 02.01.2024: “«Hoch­leistungs-Computer werden den Menschen nicht ersetzen»” (here).
* 2023: UNI NOVA Research Magazine, Iss. 141/May 2023: “The night sky in a supercomputer” (Research, here).
* 2022: HPCwire What’s New in HPC Research, Oct. 2022: here (research highlight).
* 2022: CSCS science portrait: “PASC (also) fulfills dreams”, here
* 2021:
University of Basel, Research Portrait: here and here.
* 2020: UNI NOVA Research Magazine, Iss. 135/May 2020: “A supercomputer is like a family” (Portrait, here).
* 2019:
UNI NOVA Research Magazine, Iss. 134/Nov. 2019: “Understanding abstract technology” (Kaleidoscope, here).
* 2019: Dynamic Load Balancing of Loops in OpenMP, OpenMP Booth talk at SC19: here (video).
* 2019: HPCwire What’s New in HPC Research, Oct. 2019: here (research highlight).
* 2019: ISC 2019 highlights: here (video).
* 2018: Wrapping up a Successful PASC18: here (video).
* 2018: Presentation of PASC18 conference: here (video).

FLORINA M. CIORBA
florina.ciorba@unibas.ch

 

High Performance Computing:
Autonomic Computing 
Scalable Computing
Energy-aware Computing

Performance Optimization of Scientific Applications:
Adaptive Dynamic Load Balancing
Robustness
Scalability of Dynamic Loop

Performance Modeling, Simulation, Analysis, and Visualization:
Computing and Communication Models
Modeling and Simulation
Tracing, Profiling, and Visualization
Monitoring and Operational Data Analysis