Education

In 2021, I graduated at Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna in Computer Science and Engineering with 106/110. My thesis project was the implementation and performance evaluation of different variants of the Bellman-Ford algorithm in CUDA. My thesis’ code and pdf are available on GitHub.

Since january 2024, I am attending the HPC Engineering master’s degree at Politecnico of Milan.

Work experiences

Since november 2022, I am working as HPC Technology Specialist @ CINECA, the italian university consortium for advanced computing. There I am working on benchmarking and optimization of high-performance scientific software on both ARM and Risc-V within the European Processor Initiative and the EUropean Pilot for EXascale projects funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Here I am also refining my C++ skills and learning how to program GPUs with SYCL.

Publications

F. Barbari, F. Ficarelli, and D. Cesarini, “High-throughput drug discovery on the Fujitsu A64FX architecture” in Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region Workshops, ser. HPCAsia ’24 Workshops, Nagoya, Japan: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024, pp. 17–23, ISBN: 9798400716522. DOI: 10.1145/3636480.3637095.

Hobbies and projects

It’s hard to enumerate all the side projects I work on, most of the stuff ends up in my personal repository on GitHub. The bigger projects (those big enough to get their own repo) are listed here:

• emu: a universal emulator for many CPUs. Right now it works only with x86 on ELF files but I would like to extend it to work also on EXE/PE files and with ARM or older processors like the gaming console ones. Also, I would like to find a better name for it.
• circuit_finder: an algorithm to find optimal circuits to perform a given operation.

Apart from coding, I like to read and write science-fiction stories and invent and play board games. Once I will reach a certain… maturity on these topics I will write something about it.