Irene Simó Muñoz

I am an aerospace engineer who became a computer scientist to answer a question I first met as a user of supercomputers: why do so many scientific simulations stall not because we lack ideas, but because we lack the compute and energy to run them?

My research focuses on making high-performance computing more efficient, more accessible, and lower-power so that scientists in fields like climate modeling, drug discovery, and astrophysics can run demanding workloads on the hardware they actually have access to, whether that is a laptop, a small institutional cluster, or a field station in a remote location - not only on the flagship supercomputers reserved for the most resourced labs.

Concretely, I work on Processing-In-Memory (PIM) architectures and low-precision arithmetic for the irregular, memory-bound kernels that dominate scientific computing and machine-learning inference alike; especially sparse matrix–vector and matrix–matrix multiplication. PIM slashes the energy cost of data-hungry workloads by collapsing the distance between memory and processors; low-precision arithmetic trades a small, controlled amount of numerical accuracy for large gains in speed and memory footprint. Together, these techniques can bring computations that today require a supercomputer within reach of commodity hardware without sacrificing the performance scientists depend on.

Previously, I was a software engineer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) developing the Autosubmit workflow manager for climate modelling. Before that, I was at Georgia Tech as a graduate researcher. I collaborated with Prof. Rich Vuduc in randomized triangle counting and won 2nd place in the ACM Student Research Competition (Graduate) @ SC’24. I also worked in PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty under Prof. Peng Chen’s supervision.

My research interests include Processing-In-Memory architectures, low-precision arithmetic, Numerical Linear Algebra and graph problems.

In terms of education I have obtained both my Master’s in Computer Science (2024) and my Bachelor’s in Aerospace Engineering from UPC (2022).

Past experiences include an internship at Hewlett-Packard. I since have gravitated towards more academic-inclined positions, collaborating with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) for my bachelor thesis, and interning at the International Centre of Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) among other collaborations with professors.