David Carrera

Career

From a university and a supercomputing centre to co-founding a company.

Overview

I have spent my career between a university, a supercomputing centre and a company, often more than one at a time. I started as an undergraduate researcher at UPC BarcelonaTech in 2001, taught there as an assistant and then associate professor, and did research for over a decade at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where from 2014 I led the Data-Centric Computing group. Research stays at IBM in New York kept the work close to industry.

In 2018 I co-founded Nearby Computing as a spin-off of BSC, to take what we had learned about running distributed infrastructure out of the lab and into production. I have been its CTO since, and I remain an associate professor at UPC, on extended leave.

Experience

  • Nearby Computing
    • Co-founder, CTO and ChairmanJuly 2018 to now. Barcelona
  • Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC BarcelonaTech)
    • Associate Professor, on extended leaveApril 2011 to now. High Performance Computing group
    • Assistant ProfessorSeptember 2003 to April 2011
    • Researcher, CEPBA-IBM Research InstituteJuly 2002 to September 2003
  • Barcelona Supercomputing Center
    • Senior Researcher, part timeAugust 2020 to May 2024
    • Head of the Data-Centric Computing research group2014 to August 2020
    • Associate Researcher, Autonomic Systems and e-Business PlatformsApril 2005 to 2014
  • IBM Research, T.J. Watson
    • Visiting Research ScholarFebruary to June 2012. Yorktown Heights, NY
    • InternJuly to September 2006. Hawthorne, NY
  • ESADE Business & Law School
    • Lecturer, Technology for Big DataApril to July 2017. Master in International Management

Awards and grants

  • 2018Agustín de Betancourt medalSpanish Royal Academy of Engineering. For young researchers
  • 2017ERC Proof of Concept grantEuropean Research Council. Hi-OMICS: commercialising an orchestrator for genomics workloads
  • 2014Head of group, BSC
  • 2015ERC Starting GrantEuropean Research Council. HiEST: Generative AI for Data Center Optimization, 2015 to 2020
  • 2015ICREA Academia awardCatalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. Five years
  • 2012José Castillejo mobility grantSpanish Ministry of Education
  • 2010IBM Faculty AwardIBM Research. For research on Big Data workload management

Education

  • 2008PhD in Computer Architecture, UPC BarcelonaTechOn heterogeneous workload management in clouds
  • 2002MS, UPC BarcelonaTech