Bio
My name is Leonardo de Paula Rosa Piga; some people call me as Leonardo, Piga or even just Leo. I was born in a city called Ribeirão Preto in Brazil. Since the age of 12, I've started to learn about computing. The first computer language that I learned was Basic. After that, I have mastered in some others like Java, Python and my favorite C. When I was 18, I went to study Computer Engineering at UNICAMP.
As an undergraduate student, I did some interesting project. The first one was a memory allocation system for C language that was based on Buddy System. I enjoyed doing it because I could do my own malloc and free functions. The second one was a simple random name generator program code in Java. I had to do it because I had to create names for a Database project.
However, the most important project that I did during my undergraduate study was Theora FPGA. I implemented the most CPU time consuming Theora function in hardware. I programmed it using VHDL-RTL and SystemC behavioral. In my undergrad research program, I compared these two methodologies. This project was chosen the best undergraduate research program of Institute of Computing of 2007.
In 2008, I had a GSoC proposal accepted by Xiph.org foundation. I proposed to parallelize Theora library. After three months, I finished it and I was able to hasten the video decoding process in about 15%.
In June 2008, I got my Bachelor degree as a Computer Engineer. Then, I decided to spend six months in the United States studying English in Philadelphia, PA. I've studied at ELS Philadelphia for six months.
When I returned to Brazil, I came back to UNICAMP as a MSc Computer Science Student. In November 2009, I was invited to take part on PhD Program.
During my PhD program, I characterized power and performance of Web Server, developed and implemented power-aware heuristics to do load balancing and reduce power consumption of web Datacenters. I also did an internship at AMD Research Labs in Austin for eight months, when I implemented a tool that facilitates deployment of experiments on clusters. After graduation, I got a job at AMD Research Labs in Austin.
In 2017, I joined the Power Management Architecture team of AMD as a Power Management Architect. In this role I specify, prototype, and follow the implementation of power management feature on different AMD products.
