Short description of me by me
Hi, my name is
My name is Athanasios Kastoras (/aθanásios kastóras/). If you have a hard time pronouncing Athanasios, it’s fine 
, people usually call me Thanos (/θános/).
Work, work, work, work, work, work
Currently, I work as a Junior Research Engineer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), in the Compilers and Toolchains for HPC team, managed by Roger Ferrer Ibáñez. There I try to improve the support of LLVM for the RISC-V Vector Extension. Currently I am focusing on the exploitation of the segment instructions.
Prior to joining BSC, between Oct 2023 and March 2024, I did my 6-month internship at Arm France, in the CPU Performance and Modeling team. There I extended a model of the CPU with a framework for evaluating dead block predictors as the cache replacement policy. My manager was Jérémy Sauget.
During my studies I have been working on projects with Prof. Nikos Bellas, at the Computer Systems Lab. I have mostly worked with FPGAs and High-Level Synthesis using the Xilinx Vitis HLS platform. I have also worked on the design of a simple RISC-V processor in Verilog which was the basis the many student projects at the Parallel Computer Architectures class.
We don’t need no education
I am currently studying towards a diploma in ECE at the University of Thessaly. I am reaching the end of my studies as I am writing my Thesis based on the work I have been doing in BSC.
During my studies I have focused mostly on coursework relevant to making computers faster and more reliable. This includes Hardware, Software and System courses. I am very interested in understanding how computers function from the program level to the microarchitecture. This is what drove me to take courses that study the theory behind Operating Systems, Computer Architecture and Compilers and to work on projects that involve the implementation of compilers and the design of computer systems.
One field that I haven’t explored as much as I would like to is this of programming languages. I plan to cover this gap via self-study.
Languages
- I am a native Greek speaker and I am fluent in English
- Currently I am learning Spanish
- After learning Spanish and if I decide to stay in Barcelona for long I might need to learn some Catalan
- In the future I would like to learn Arabic and French
Other interest
- I love hiking in the mountains. My two favourite mountains are Mt. Pelion where I often hike small trails and Mt. Olympus, the mountains of the gods, where I have been twice
- I love spending time in nature and camping is one of my favouite ways to relax
- I enjoy reading books, especially about history, politics and philosophy
