Dr. Mateo Valero Cortés

Professor Mateo Valero is an active researcher that has made seminal contributions to Computer Architecture as acknowledged by the three most important awards in the topic: The IEEE-ACM Eckert-Mauchly award celebrates worldwide recognition in the area of Computer Architecture, the IEEE Seymour Cray Computer Engineering is presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems and
the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award in recognition of significant contributions in the field of parallel computation.

The 2007 Eckert-Mauchly award citation is “For extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism.”

The 2015 Seymour Cray award citation is “In recognition of seminal contributions to vector, out-oforder, multithreaded, and VLIW architectures.”

The 2017 Charles Babbage Award citation is “For contributions to parallel computation through brilliant technical work, mentoring PhD students, and building an incredibly productive European research environment.”

He contributed to the design of Vector, Superscalar, Multicore, VLIW, Multithreaded and Systolic Array Processors as well as in Interconnection Networks, Multiprocessor Systems, Transactional Memory and Compilers for VLIW architectures. This unparalleled range of contributions makes Mateo one of the most multi-faceted researchers in the field. Some of his contributions to the field have directly influenced the design of high performance processors and compilers of companies such as Cray, Intel, Compaq, NEC, IBM, Sun, HP and Equator. His number of publications is over 700 (h index of 57) and the number of talks he was invited to give is more than 600 – another indication of his preeminence in the field.

Recently, Professor Valero obtained an individual research grant from the European Union’s ERC to investigate the design of future multiprocessor chips and supercomputers. He named these architectures “Run-time Aware Architectures”. These awards are very competitive and difficult to obtain; they are for five years and come with an excellent economic endowment. This scholarship is for the period 2013-2018. This is a very exciting new project, and given Prof. Valero’s record of accomplishment, may just constitute the “next big thing” in Computer Architecture. 

At his University, UPC, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC, in Barcelona, he was responsible for the creation and nurturing of the computer architecture as a research and educational field in Spain.

He was responsible for convincing the European Union to fund computer architecture research as a major activity. His leadership within the European computer architecture community resulted in the creation of the European Union’s Program for Research in Computer Architecture and Compilers, and the HiPEAC European “Network of Excellence”. He became the founding coordinator of HiPEAC, currently with more than 2000 researchers from industry and academia. In addition to HiPEAC, he established the fact that the design and programming of chips with several processors and of supercomputers are, for the first time, a major topic of research projects within the European community, with European-level
funding.

In the last 10 years, Professor Mateo Valero has been the promoter of a European challenge, which has now become a reality due to the high institutional support and funding. This initiative aims to develop a high-quality competitive European family of microprocessors that will be used in the design of future European supercomputers. The target is to have, by 2020, at least two pre-exascale supercomputers and reach full exascale performance by 2023. Additionally, in the same project, several accelerators for HPC, autonomous cars, IoT and Artificial Intelligence applications will be also developed.

Mateo’s technical and organizational contributions to Information technology in Europe have been recognized by his selection to the Hall of Fame in Europe as one of the 25 most recognized researchers in Information technologies during the last 25 years.

Mateo was a pioneer in the creation and direction of research centers in parallel supercomputers in Spain, through CEPBA (European Center of Parallelism in Barcelona) in 1991. From that center he disseminated these technologies to the universities and to companies in Spain and Europe collaborating in more than 50 European projects.

CEPBA became one the world leader in software development tools and programming languages for supercomputers. This made IBM establish in UPC in 2000, the CIRI (CEPBA-IBM Research Institute).  This Institute, of which he was director, was the first that IBM established in a European university. From CIRI, he collaborated on IBM flagship projects such as BlueGene, the world’s fastest supercomputer at the time.

Mateo’s most recent achievement is the creation in 2005, of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the Spanish National Lab of Supercomputing. His first supercomputer, MareNostrum I, in 2004 was the fastest in Europe for almost 3 years and became the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world. The centre now employs over 500 researchers in Computer Science, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computer Applications in Science and Engineering. The BSC is nowadays a major supercomputing organization worldwide. Professor Valero is the director of BSC from its creation.