Congratulations on your successful PhD defense, Dr. Ravedutti!
On February 11, 2026, Rafael Ravedutti Lucio Machado successfully defended his doctoral thesis. He completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Harald Köstler while serving as a research assistant at NHR@FAU.
During his doctoral studies, Rafael developed MD-Bench, a performance-focused prototyping harness for state-of-the-art molecular dynamics (MD) kernels, designed to enable systematic performance analysis and optimization studies.
Another focus of his PhD was the conception and development of P4IRS, a stand-alone compiler and domain-specific language for particle simulations, capable of generating optimized code for parallel execution on multi-CPU and multi-GPU platforms.
Rafael worked with performance modeling and analysis, programming models and compiler techniques for particle simulations, focusing on molecular dynamics (MD) and discrete element method (DEM). Currently, he contributes to the EoCoE-III project (Energy Oriented Center of Excellence), optimizing fluid simulation code for GPUs.
After presenting and successfully defending his work “Reaching optimal performance for particle simulations: from performance engineering to automatic code generation,” to the PhD committee and a broader audience, the outcome was announced by Prof. Fey, the head of the PhD committee. Congratulations on your doctorate, Rafael!
The PhD committee, many former and current colleagues, group members from LSS and NHR@FAU, and friends gathered for the subsequent celebration. His doctoral hat, assembled by his fellow PhD candidates, showed some of his work and hobbies: an elementary cell of a copper lattice (used as a benchmark in his work on MD-Bench), an image of him proudly presenting his PPAM 2022 Best Paper Award, his passion for heavy-metal music, computer games, and Spezi, and more.
We thank Rafael for his valuable work over the past years and wish him continued success in his work at NHR@FAU.