Alex Villa

Hello!

I'm Alex, I am an incoming ECE Ph.D. student at the University of Florida.

View CV ↗

Previously, I completed my B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of California, Merced. I also obtained a minor in Applied Mathematics.

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.

My research has been supported by Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Google-CASHI. See my research interests here

Recent News

- **June 2026** — One Paper accepted at ECCV 2026! - **May 2026** — Started interning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the summer! `:>`

Research Interests

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

Experience

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Visiting Computing Scholar

May 2026 – August 2026
Mentor: Dr. Daniel Nichols
  • Implementing and optimizing communication-efficient collective operations via statistical modeling.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Software Systems Intern, Weapons Research Services-Weapon Mission Technology

May 2025 – Nov 2025
Mentors: Luis Diaz, Rachel Martin
  • Partnered with customers to triage and resolve performance, compatibility, and configuration issues migrating HPC workloads to cloud platforms.
  • Built a standardized internal framework for software lifecycle automation, cutting manual intervention by 87% and downtime by 50%
  • Developing APIs and workflows to automate Granta MI user and property management across DOE NNSA.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Summer Research Intern, Computational Physics Division

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024
Mentors: Dr. Richard Berger, Dr. Davis Herring
  • 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 – Jan 2026
Supervisor: Prof. Xiaoyi Lu
  • 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 – May 2026
  • 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

📧 alex.villa@ufl.edu

💼 LinkedIn | GitHub

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