Alessandro Curioni

Alessandro Curioni
Alma materScuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Known forCPMD code
AwardsGordon Bell Prize (2013, 2015, as team member)
IBM Fellow (2014)
Scientific career
FieldsComputational science, high-performance computing, quantum computing, artificial intelligence
WorkplacesIBM Research – Zurich

Alessandro Curioni is an Italian computational scientist. He is an IBM Fellow, Vice President of IBM Research Europe and Africa, and director of the IBM Research – Zurich laboratory in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. He was one of the developers of the CPMD code for ab initio molecular dynamics, and was a member of the teams awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2013 and 2015.

Education

Curioni received his undergraduate degree in theoretical chemistry and his PhD from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

Career

Curioni started at IBM Research – Zurich as a PhD student in 1993 and joined the laboratory as a research staff member in 1998; he later became the manager of its Cognitive Computing and Computational Sciences department. He was appointed an IBM Fellow in 2014.

In April 2015 he was named vice president and director of IBM Research – Zurich, succeeding Matthias Kaiserswerth. His responsibilities were later expanded to Vice President of IBM Research Europe and Africa, and he leads IBM Research's global work on algorithms and applications.

Research

Curioni's research concerns high-performance computing and computational science. He was one of the developers of CPMD, a parallelized plane-wave/pseudopotential implementation of density functional theory designed for Car–Parrinello (ab initio) molecular dynamics; he coordinated the CPMD consortium established in 2001 to oversee the code's development and distribution and served as the code's maintainer. In 2022 IBM released CPMD as free software under the MIT License.

In 2013, Curioni was a member of the team awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for petascale simulations of cloud cavitation collapse, carried out on the Sequoia IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 2015, he was a member of the team awarded the Gordon Bell Prize for an extreme-scale implicit solver simulating flow in the Earth's mantle, which scaled to over 1.5 million processor cores.

Awards and honors

References

  1. 1 2 "ETH Zürich setzt auf Quantencomputer – dank Unterstützung von IBM". Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in German). 4 April 2026. Archived from the original on 3 September 2026. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Alessandro Curioni". IBM Research. Archived from the original on 25 August 2026. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  3. 1 2 "CPMD". BioExcel – Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research. Archived from the original on 14 June 2026. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 "Trailblazing Approach to Modeling Earth's Geological Processes Wins Gordon Bell Prize" (Press release). Association for Computing Machinery. 20 November 2015. Archived from the original on 1 April 2026. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 "Alessandro Curioni named director of IBM Research, Zurich". NCCR MARVEL. 19 May 2015. Archived from the original on 10 May 2026. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  6. ↑ "OpenCPMD". GitHub. Archived from the original on 14 February 2025. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  7. ↑ "CPMD: Car–Parrinello Molecular Dynamics. An ab initio Electronic Structure and Molecular Dynamics Program (Manual, v3.17.1)" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 29 August 2024. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  8. 1 2 "Gordon Bell Prize 2013 for bubble simulation: Strong Swiss contribution". hpc-ch. 30 November 2013. Archived from the original on 12 September 2024. Retrieved 31 August 2026.
  9. ↑ Bell, Gordon; Bailey, David H.; Dongarra, Jack; Karp, Alan H.; Walsh, Kevin (2017). "A look back on 30 years of the Gordon Bell Prize" (PDF). The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 31 (6). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2026-09-25. Retrieved 2026-09-25.
  10. ↑ "Full Members". Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW). Archived from the original on 24 September 2026. Retrieved 31 August 2026.