Dr. Leonardo A. Bautista Gomez (Leo)

Founder and Research Leader of MigaLabs
and Senior Researcher at Codex
Email: leo (at) status (dot) im

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Research

Here is a list of the research projects I am working/have worked on recently.

Next Generation Blockchain Analysis

Miga Labs is a group specialized in next-generation Blockchain technology. Our research team is located at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. The focus of our work is Sharding and Proof-of-Stake protocols. In order to increase scalability, Eth2 will be a composition of many blockchains, called shards, connected through a back-bone, called the beacon chain. This new architecture poses pressure on different parts of the protocol and open new forms of complexity. At Miga Labs we are building systems to make sense of the vast amount of data coming from the Eth2 network.

Fault Tolerance Interface

FTI stands for Fault Tolerance Interface and is a library that aims to give computational scientists the means to perform fast and efficient multilevel checkpointing in large scale supercomputers. FTI leverages local storage plus data replication and erasure codes to provide several levels of reliability and performance. FTI is application-level checkpointing and allows users to select which datasets needs to be protected, in order to improve efficiency and avoid wasting space, time and energy. In addition, it offers a direct data interface so that users do not need to deal with files and/or directory names. All metadata is managed by FTI in a transparent fashion for the user. If desired, users can dedicate one process per node to overlap fault tolerance workload and scientific computation, so that post-checkpoint tasks are executed asynchronously.

Energy oriented Center of Excellence

At the crossroads of the energy and digital revolutions, EoCoE develops and applies cutting-edge computational methods in its mission to accelerate the transition to the production, storage and management of clean, decarbonized energy. The aim of this project is to establish an Energy Oriented Centre of Excellence for computing applications, (EoCoE). EoCoE (pronounce “Echo”) uses the prodigious potential offered by the ever-growing computing infrastructure to foster and accelerate the European transition to a reliable and low carbon energy supply. To achieve this goal, we believe that the present revolution in hardware technology calls for a similar paradigm change in the way application codes are designed. EoCoE assistis the energy transition via targeted support to four renewable energy pillars: Meteo, Materials, Water and Fusion, each with a heavy reliance on numerical modelling. These four pillars are anchored within a strong transversal multidisciplinary basis providing high-end expertise in applied mathematics and HPC.

Open Source Processor

The eProcessor 3-year project aims to build a new open source OoO processor and deliver the first completely open source European full-stack ecosystem based on this new RISC-V CPU. eProcessor technology will be extendable (open source), energy efficient (low power), extreme-scale (high performance), suitable for uses in HPC and embedded applications, and extensible (easy to add on-chip and/or off-chip components). The project is an ambitious combination of processor design, based on the RISC-V open source hardware ISA, applications and system software, bringing together multiple partners to leverage and extend pre-existing Intellectual Property (IP), combined with new IP that can be used as building blocks for future HPC systems, both for traditional and emerging application domains.

Low Energy Toolset for Heterogeneous Computing

Due to fundamental limitations of scaling at the atomic scale, coupled with heat density problems of packing an ever increasing number of transistors in a unit area, Moore’s Law has slowed down. Heterogeneity aims to solve the problems associated with the end of Moore’s Law by incorporating more specialized compute units in the system hardware and by utilizing the most efficient compute unit for each computation. However, while software-stack support for heterogeneity is relatively well developed for performance, for power- and energy-efficient computing it is severely lacking. The primary ambition of the LEGaTO project is to address this challenge by starting with a Made-in-Europe mature software stack, and optimizing this stack to support energy-efficient computing on a commercial cutting-edge European-developed CPU–GPU–FPGA heterogeneous hardware substrate and FPGA-based Dataflow Engines (DFE), which will lead to an order of magnitude increase in energy efficiency.

Sharded Blockchain Simulator

We developed an open-source discrete-event blockchain simulator where different protocols/techniques, such as sharding, are simulated and studied with synthetic traces. The simulator includes features such as byzantine nodes, and other types of attacks. The simulator runs in multiple processes in a distributed system communicating through MPI, each MPI rank simulating one node of the network. The simulator scales to thousands of processes in a supercomputer and simulates thousands of blocks.

Modular and Power-efficient HPC Processor

Compute efficiency and energy efficiency are more than ever major concerns for future Exascale systems. Since October 2011, the aim of the European projects called Mont-Blanc has been to design a new type of computer architecture capable of setting future global HPC standards, built from energy efficient Arm solutions. Phases 1 (2011-2015) and 2 (2013-2016) of the project were coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). They investigated the usage of low-power Arm processors for HPC and gave rise to the world’s first Arm-based HPC cluster, which helped demonstrate the viability of using Arm technology for HPC. The third phase of the Mont-Blanc project started in October 2015: it is coordinated by Atos (formerly Bull). It aims at designing a new high-end HPC platform that is able to deliver a new level of performance / energy ratio when executing real applications. Finally, Mont-Blanc 2020 is a spin-off of the previous projects. It is coordinated by Atos and started in December 2017. It ambitions to trigger the development of the next generation of industrial processor for Big Data and High Performance Computing.

Dynamical Exascale Entry Platform

How does one cover the needs of both HPC (high performance computing) and HPDA (high performance data analytics) applications? Which hardware and software technologies are needed? How should these technologies be combined so that very different kinds of applications are able to efficiently exploit them? And how can we – on the way – tackle some of the challenges posed by next-gen supercomputers of the Exascale class, like energy efficiency? These are the questions the EU-funded project DEEP-EST addresses with it’s Modular Supercomputing architecture.

Lossy Floating Point Data Compression

Modern scientific technology such as particle accel- erators, telescopes, and supercomputers are producing extremely large amounts of data. That scientific data needs to be processed by using systems with high computational capabilities such as supercomputers. Given that the scientific data is increasing in size at an exponential rate, storing and accessing the data are becoming expensive in both time and space. Most of this scientific data is stored by using floating point representation. Scientific applications executed on supercomputers spend a large amount of CPU cycles reading and writing floating point values, making data compression techniques an interesting way to increase com- puting efficiency. Given the accuracy requirements of scientific computing, we only focus on lossless data compression. In this project we propose a masking technique that partially decreases the entropy of scientific datasets, allowing for a better compression ratio and higher throughput. We evaluate several data partitioning techniques for selective compression and compare these schemes with several existing compression strategies. Our approach shows up to 15% improvement in compression ratio while reducing the time spent in compression by half time in some cases.