Mateo Valero Cortés

Creator and Director of the European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA), Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect born in Alfamén, Aragon, Spain. He has served as the Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the National Centre of Supercomputing in Spain, which hosts the MareNostrum supercomputer. His research focuses on computer architecture, with a special interest in high-performance computers, processor organization, memory hierarchy, systolic array processors, interconnection networks, numerical algorithms, compilers, and performance evaluation.

Valero Cortés earned his Telecommunication Engineering Degree from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in 1974, after which he joined the Computer Architecture Department at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Catalonia, Spain as a Professor, becoming a Full Professor in 1983. He earned his Ph.D. in Telecommunications from UPC in 1980. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates by the Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Belgrade, the Universities of Las Palmas de Gran Canarias and Zaragoza in Spain, and by the University of Veracruz in Mexico.

From 1990 to 1995 he created and directed the European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA), performing basic and applied research in parallel computing. In December 1994, he became a founding member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering. Valero Cortés has served in the organization of more than 300 International Conferences and gave numerous speeches, and he has also served on numerous Boards and Committees.

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the IEEE Computer Society Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2007, "for extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism." He also received two Spanish National awards — the "Julio Rey Pastor" to recognize research on IT technologies and the "Leonardo Torres Quevedo" to recognize research in Engineering, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, presented by the King of Spain — and the "King Jaime I" in research by the Generalitat Valenciana, presented by the Queen of Spain. He additionally received the IEEE Harry Goode Award in 2009 "in recognition of seminal contribution to vector, out-of-order, multithreaded, and VLIW processor architectures."

In 1998 Valero Cortés won a "Favorite Son" Award from his home town, Alfamén, and in 2006 the town named their Public College after him. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the ACM, and an Intel Distinguished Research Fellow. In addition to having co-authored over 600 publications in Conferences, Journals, and Book Chapters, he has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the IEEE Micro Journal, the IEEE Computer Architectural Letters, and the Journal of Parallel Programming Languages, and as editor of several special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Computers and Computer Magazine.