Giuseppe M. J. Barca is an Assistant Professor of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Computational Chemistry in the School of Computing at the Australian National University (ANU). He is the leader one of the Pawsey Centre for Extreme-scale Computing (PaCER) projects,  and the lead of GPU development for the GAMESS Exascale Computing Project.

 

Giuseppe is also the Chair of the ANU Merit Allocation Scheme overseeing the allocation of 286 million CPU-hours on the National Computational Infrastructure among approximately 200 researchers from different colleges at ANU.

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Giuseppe began his independent career as an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in 2020 at ANU. He has received a Bachelor and a Master Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Salerno. He obtained a PhD in Theoretical and Computational Quantum Chemistry in 2017, working the group of Prof. Peter Gill at ANU. During his postdoc from 2018 to 2020 he worked with Prof. Alistair Rendell and Prof. Mark Gordon across the ANU, the Ames National Lab, and the Oak Ridge  and Argonne National Labs. 

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Giuseppe's research focuses on advancing translational digital technologies that leverage HPC and machine learning (ML) to augment, simplify, or even supplant traditional physical experimentation in scientific research and development. Giuseppe is a pioneer in the design of new computational science methods, algorithms and software for exascale supercomputers, which use thousands of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). These transformative software solutions are applied on leadership computing facilities worldwide to accelerate the rate innovation and discovery in key technological domains including but not limited to the design of novel therapeutics, catalysts, and meta-materials with unusual and highly desirable properties.

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From 2020 to 2022, the Barca group designed novel high-performance computational quantum chemistry algorithms and software that scaled on all 27,600 GPUs of the Summit supercomputer (#1 in the Top 500 at that time) at the Oak Ridge National Lab, breaking the world record for the largest computational-driven quantum chemical modelling of material structure. This demonstrated the innovative nature of the software solutions in HPC and their potential to streamline the development of novel materials, catalysts, and drugs. These achievements were published as papers in Proceedings of the Supercomputing Conference (SC) in 2020, 2021 2022, the top conference venue in HPC, and led to several press releases, including on the leading news magazine in the field, HPC wire. 

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In January 2023, the translational nature of Giuseppe's research led to spinning out QDX Technologies, a deep-tech drug-discovery company of which I he is Co-Founder and Head of Research.

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