Roberto Porcu

Senior Hpc Software Engineer @Battelle

Houston, TX, US

Consulting for the U.S. Department of Energy, I am a core developer for MFIX-Exa, a state-of-the-art computational tool redefining multiphase flow simulations for Chemical Looping Reactors (CLRs)—a critical technology for carbon capture and CO₂ emissions reduction. My work enables high-fidelity, massively parallel simulations on the world’s most advanced Exascale supercomputers, such as Frontier and Aurora (#2 and #3 in the TOP500 list as of Nov. 2024).As the C++ and GPU programming lead, I led the integration of advanced numerical algorithms and hybrid MPI+GPU parallelization, ensuring the software scales efficiently on next-generation systems. Beyond performance optimization, I design mathematical algorithms that enhance MFIX-Exa’s accuracy, scalability, and ability to simulate chemically reacting gas-solid flows.Key Contributions & Technical Achievements: Thermodynamics & Energy Conservation – Implemented an energy conservation framework, enabling MFIX-Exa to model heat transfer and thermodynamics with high accuracy. Ideal-Gas Law Implementation – Extended MFIX-Exa’s framework to model compressible gases, significantly improving simulation fidelity for real-world CLRs. Chemical Reaction Modeling – Developed robust algorithms for chemical kinetics. Particle-Particle Collision Optimization – Accelerated large-scale particle simulations by optimizing force computation algorithms, achieving a 3x speedup in performance. Low-to-High Fidelity Transition – Designed a novel approach to reduce computational costs in CLR simulations while maintaining physical accuracy.

Politecnico di Milano

Bachelor Degree, Mathematical Engineering

Politecnico di Milano

Master Degree, Mathematical Engineering - Computational Sciences for Engineering

Rice University

Quantum Computing Algorithms

Politecnico di Milano

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematical Models and Methods in Engineering