The talk entitled “High Performance Computing for Bioinformatics Applications: the Quest for Performance” will be presented by Prof. Alba Alves de Melo (University of Brasilia) and will take place on the 20th February, at 14:30, in room B018. Prof. João Bispo (DEI) will moderate the session.
About the Talk:
“Bioinformatics applications are often computationally intensive, making High-Performance Computing (HPC) highly desirable. In this lecture, I will present parallel bioinformatics applications developed for High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments over the years by my research group at the LAICO Laboratory at the University of Brasília. The following will be addressed: (a) parallel applications for exact pairwise comparison of long biological sequences in clusters of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and CPUs; (b) exact multiple sequence alignment applications for multithreaded architectures; (c) exact RNA secondary structure prediction (folding and alignment) in GPU; and (d) heuristic protein folding in a supercomputer. Finally, a framework for executing scientific workflows in the HPC cloud will be presented.”
About the Speaker:
Alba Cristina Magalhaes Alves de Melo obtained her PhD in Computer Science from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), France, in 1996. Since 1997, she is with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, where she is now Full Professor. Prof. Melo is IEEE Senior Member, Vice-Coordinator of the IEEE Technical Community of Parallel Processing (TCPP) since 2024 and Member of the Counselling Committee in Computer Science for CNPq/Brazil since 2025. Prof. Melo received the following awards: 2023 IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) Outstanding Service and Contributions Award; 2019 Wilkes Award for the Best Paper Published in The Computer Journal in 2018, Oxford University Press (joint work with the UPC/BSC team); 2016 Award for Advisor of the Best PhD Thesis in Computer Science in Brazil (Premio Capes de Tese).
She is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Applications section of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems (JPDC). She is also Associate Editor of many prestigious journals such as IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM Computing Surveys and Future Generation Computer Systems. She was Co-General Chair of IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) 2024. She has served as Program Chair or Track Chair of many prestigious conferences in high performance computing such as IPDPS, Supercomputing (SC), Euro-Par, HiPEAC, Cluster, ICPP, SBAC-PAD and HiPC. Prof. Melo’s research group has established long lasting collaborations with research teams from the University of Ottawa, Canada (since 2005); INRIA/Saclay and Mines Paris Tech, France (since 2011); Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya/ Barcelona Supercomputing Center (UPC/BSC), Spain (since 2012); and University of Copenhagen, Denmark (since 2017). Her research interests are high performance computing, bioinformatics and cloud computing.