Hello!

I'm Alex, I study Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Merced.

I'm an undergraduate Computer Science & Engineering student at the University of California, Merced. I am broadly interested in high performance and parallel computing with applications to Deep Learning and Computational Physics. More specifically I am interested in designing efficient collective communication primitives for emerging workloads, tensor optimizations, and scalable scientific machine learning. See my research interests here

Research Interests

I focus on HPC techniques and parallel algorithms, especially for ML and scientific workloads:

I am inspired and motivated through problems that arise in Deep Learning and Computational Physics applications.

Experience

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Summer Research Intern, Computational Physics Division

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024
  • Designed & implemented C++ pointer support in FleCSI (C++17/20/23), enabling direct task parameterization of complex data.
  • Optimized distributed CPU/GPU memory access & validation for asynchronous task pipelines in scientific workloads.
  • Leveraged Legion & NVIDIA HPC SDK to enhance memory safety and performance in computational physics simulations.
View Project

UC Merced

Undergraduate Research Assistant, PADSYS Lab

Oct 2023 – Present
  • Presented MPI & distributed DL proxy benchmarks (CabanaMD, miniMD) in in-depth research talks.
  • Analyzed Horovod collective patterns (ring vs butterfly Allreduce) & compared MPICH, NVIDIA NCCL, Horovod implementations.
  • Prototyped optimizations to accelerate DL model parallelism and evaluate communication bottlenecks.

UC Merced

Student Technology Consultant, Cyberinfrastructure Team

Oct 2022 – Present
  • Support HPC users: job scheduling, environment modules, debugging on campus cluster.
  • Authored & maintained comprehensive HPC user documentation & tutorials.
  • Led workshops on SLURM, MPI, containerization (Singularity/Apptainer).
Docs Site

Preprints and Publications

Awards & Honors

Services & Involvement

Talks & Presentations

Education

Get in Touch

📧 avilla@lanl.gov

💼 LinkedIn | GitHub

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