"Astrophysics" is a collective name for an abounding diversity of disciplines and fields that desperately need to perform an astounding quantity of numerical calculus to either reduce observational data and interpret them, or to simulate the celestial phenomena and contrast the (usually somehow wrong) results with the reality. Dealing with a gargantuesque dynamic range and including a stunning assortment of physical processes that present foolishly different characteristic scales in both time and space, sounds like a game only for very arrogant people. HPC is unavoidable in order to tackle the present day and the forthcoming scientific challenges: however, being the HPC at a cross-roads whose countless directions are still unclear, what does it mean to apply it to this field in practice?
Luca is an astrophysicist. If that does not sound suspicious enough: he genuinely finds a lot of fun in programming, since his adolescence. Despite that, many consider him a decent person. He graduated from Padova, at Galileo's University, and did his PhD in Trieste under the guide of one of the most renowned numerical cosmologists (an occasion to become a great scientist that he mostly wasted). During his PhD, he fused two of his passions, astrophysics and programming. He then became a strange creature: a scientist expert in HPC. In this guise, he spent his career at the University of Trieste, at the SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) and at INAF (Italian National Institute for Astrophysics), where he currently has a permanent position as a researcher. He is involved in several international collaborations and EU projects in the HPC fields. Luca teaches HPC at the University of Trieste and at the Master's in HPC at SISSA/ICTP.
