About the CUDA Research Center at The Irish Center for High-End Computing
The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) was established as a national High-Performance Computing (HPC) provider in late 2005 under the aegis of NUI, Galway, and funded since that time jointly by the Higher Education Authority (HEA, with mostly capital funding) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI, with recurrent and staffing costs).

Its mission is to provide High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources principally for researchers in third-level institutions.  A skilled team of system administrators and computational scientists now engage with these researchers to support the development of internationally competitive computational modeling and world-class research across all the main disciplines and institutions.

About the PI
Gilles Civario is Head of ICHEC's Capability Computing and Novel Architecture group, and is also involved in the broader aspects of the Centre's mission where his expertise is useful in areas such as highly complicated code installation, debugging or optimization and hardware evaluation.

After completing two Master degrees in Scientific Computing and Algorithms, Gilles joined the R&D team of EDF and was responsible for developing and maintaining nuclear power plant simulation codes, in collaboration with the CEA.  From there he worked as a support scientist with CEA/CCRT, one of the largest HPC centers in Europe.  Here Gilles was involved in installing, developing, debugging and optimizing codes across many scientific fields.  Gilles then joined Bull's HPC benchmarking team, where he contributed to the design and deployment of HPC systems of all sizes, including some of the largest of the Top500 machines.

In his present role, Gilles is heavily involved in building the user community for ICHEC's IBM BlueGene machines and enabling our users to win access to larger facilities worldwide.  For example, in 2009 Gilles was instrumental in enabling two of our users to successfully secure access to PRACE and execute projects on Europe’s most powerful machines, scaling up to 262,144 cores.

ICHECH's GPGPU group in particular, led by Gilles, has gained wide recognition from industry developers and users alike for driving forward the development of this novel architecture.