Ramon Nou

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Dr. Ramon Nou Castell

BSC
Nexus I - Despatx 302 - Campus Nord
C. Jordi Girona 29 
08034 Barcelona
SPAIN

 


BSC Researcher
Computational Sciences,
Storage Systems
email

Education

Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Technical University of Catalonia, 2008.
M.S. degree in Computer Science, Technical University of Catalonia, 2004.
 

About me

Ramon Nou Castell has been involved in the world of computers since he was seven years old. He started off learning BASIC on his own and later he began studying Pascal, C, and Assembler (Z80, and x86 later) while becoming interested in optimization.

At eighteen years old, he was a contestant at the National Phase of the OIE (Spanish Computer Olympics). Later, in his University years, he came fourth in the First Programming Contest at UPC and went to SWERC'03 held in Paris by the ACM & IBM to represent UPC. His expertise and interest in algorithms increased while training for these events.

During his University years, he started to program closed devices such as game consoles like the Playstation 1. When the Playstation 2 was released he founded the PS2Reality.net web page (now called PSXReality.net) where several Game Programming tutorials were created, and where the well-known PS2Reality Mediaplayer (2001) was finally developed. This appeared in several magazines world-wide, and became one of the most downloaded homebrew software for the system. While developing this piece of software, he became interested in MIPS assembler (R5900) and VU (Vectorial Units) programming and optimization for PS2.

His final year project, which was a MobLog system written for J2ME and Windows CE systems with WebServices, was directed by Prof. Jordi Torres in 2004. After that he continued to have ties to UPC where he codirected several final year projects with Jordi Torres, and did several C++ classes to train future programming contestants at UPC.

When he received his MS degree, he started work at ABA developing an online english course, which involved programming several specialized servers, and working on web technologies. Later in September 2004 he started to study his PhD at the Computer Architecture Department in UPC under Dr. Jordi Torres's direction. Finally in September 2005, he achieved a "FPI", becoming a Research Scholarship Holder at UPC, and left his job at ABA to pursue his studies full time.

During 2006 he had become Researcher at BSC under the Computational Sciences, Autonomic System and e-Business Platforms under Dr. Jordi Torres direction working under the Modelling and Prediction working area. This area is devoted to extract models from complex systems in order to incorporate them into the core engine when they become autonomic.

His PhD, Using online simulation to improve QoS on middleware, was finished on 31st October 2008.

Actually, I am working since 2008 in the BSC - Storage Systems Area - under Dr. Toni Cortes direction. I worked in XtreemOS European Project, the IOLanes project and  the PRACE project. I am working on MontBlanc I & II EP Project, IOSTACK EP Project, NextGENIO EP Project and BigStorage ETN Network.

My principal work in the last period is an automatic tuning method for I/O Schedulers using workload identification and filesystem optimization on non-volatile devices.