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JORDI TORRESProfessor Contact: email: torres (at) ac.upc.edu - telf. +34 93 401 7223 |
Jordi Torres has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, 1988) and also holds a Ph. D. from the same institution (Best UPC Computer Science Thesis Award, 1993). Currently he is a full professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC and is a manager for the Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms research line in Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). At this moment in time his research centres on making IT resources more efficient, and focuses on the resource management needs of modern systems in this new era of global computation, as imposed by new paradigms such as web 2.0 or cloud computing. Currently he is actively working to combine the research from different research areas such as autonomic computing, parallel and distributed systems, performance modelling, virtualization, machine learning, amongst others, to reasonably stem the difficulties to obtain more sustainable IT (Green Computing). He has worked in a number of EU and industrial research and development projects. Hi has more that 80 publications and was involved in several conferences in the area. He has been Vice-dean of Institutional Relations at the Computer Science School, and a he has also participated in numerous academic management activities and institutional representation.
CV Summary:
Jordi Torres Viñals is married, has two children, and resides in Argentona (a small town near Barcelona). He obtained a Masters degree in Computer Science in 1988 at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC, Barcelona) and holds a Ph. D. in Computer Science (UPC, 1993, Best UPC Computer Science Thesis Award). Currently he is a full professor in the Computer Architecture Department (DAC) at UPC.
His knowledge background comes from the areas of Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Computer Networks and Distributed Applications. His research activities from the beginning, in 1988, centred on the area of parallelism in the High Performance Computing Group (HPC) at DAC. One of his relevant contributions to the HPC group was to extend the applicability of parallel computation beyond normal HPC applications to new environments and commercial applications, as well as contributing to the creation (with the eDragon group) a research community in this new area. Currently this community within the HPC group has been consolidated with a group of research doctors, doctorate students and masters students who are working on these new themes.
On a personal level he is committed to taking care of the environment and preventing the waste of resources in general. For this reason his current principal interest and responsibility as a researcher is to re-imagine and participate in the new more sustainable era of global computation where millions of heterogeneous devices will cooperate through an intelligent layer over internet , which will inevitably transform society for the better. At this moment in time his research centres on making IT resources more efficient, and focuses on the resource management needs of modern systems in this new era of global computation, as imposed by new paradigms such as web 2.0 or cloud computing. In this changing scene, the requirement for new types of complex resources augments the problem of resource management and, by extension, efficiently using them without waste becomes a more complex problem to solve. His vision is that the complexity of modern middleware and systems required by society will grow at an exponential rate and will represent one of the most significant challenges in the coming years. Due to the rising complexity we must be more imaginative since the solution for this important challenge of building more sustainable and efficient IT will have to come from cross-disciplinary studies over a diverse set of research areas. Currently he is actively working to combine the research from different research areas such as autonomic computing, parallel and distributed systems, performance modelling, virtualization, machine learning, amongst others, to reasonably stem the difficulties that this complexity brings in obtaining more sustainable IT (Green Computing).
He has more than 80 publications in journals, conferences and book chapters. He is member of IEEE, ACM and ISOC and was involved in several conferences organized by these associations.
He was a member of the European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA) (1994-2004) and a member of the board of managers of CEPBA-IBM Research Institute (CIRI) (2000-2004). He has worked in a number of EU and industrial research and development projects at CEPBA and CIRI. In 2005 the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC) was founded and he was nominated as a Manager for Autonomic Systems and eBusiness Platforms research line in BSC. Currently he participates and leads projects from the 6th Framework EU Program and research projects with IBM.
He lectures and has created new courses on Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture and on Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems in the Computer Science School (FIB) of UPC and in the PhD program of the Computer Architecture department of UPC.
He has been Vice-dean of Institutional Relations at the Computer Science School (1998-2001), and a member of the Catedra Telefonica-UPC where he worked in teaching innovation (2003-2005). He has also participated in numerous academic management activities and institutional representation from 1990 onwards. More information could be found at www.JordiTorres.org.
