Alberto Zeni, PhD

prof_pic.jpg

Meta

Oslo, Norway

I am currently an AI/HPC Systems Research Scientist at Meta in Oslo, Norway, working on kernels, runtime, collectives, and infrastructure for the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) at data-center scale. Previously, I was a Computer Architect at AMD, where I worked on the design, testing, and validation of the AMD NPU array architecture and was a founding member of the AMD -omics research group.

I hold a Ph.D. in Information Technology and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering, all from Politecnico di Milano. My research focuses on high-performance kernels and applications for FPGAs, GPUs, and AI accelerators, with a particular emphasis on genome analysis and, more recently, AI systems and infrastructure at data-center scale. I am also a Co-Founder of GenoGra, a startup delivering scalable, hardware-accelerated genomic analysis software. GenoGra won the StartCup Lombardia 2022 and Switch2Product 2022 competitions, the Chimica Verde Award 2024, and closed a €1M pre-seed round in 2025.

A recent CV.

The best way to contact me is by email: alberto.zeni@polimi.it

selected publications

  1. Logan: High-performance gpu-based x-drop long-read alignment
    Alberto Zeni, Giulia Guidi, Marquita Ellis, and 6 more authors
    In 2020 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 2020
  2. The importance of being x-drop: High performance genome alignment on reconfigurable hardware
    Alberto Zeni, Guido Walter Di Donato, Lorenzo Di Tucci, and 2 more authors
    In 2021 IEEE 29th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2021
  3. Optimized implementation of the hpcg benchmark on reconfigurable hardware
    Alberto Zeni, Kenneth O’Brien, Michaela Blott, and 1 more author
    In Euro-Par 2021: Parallel Processing: 27th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Lisbon, Portugal, September 1–3, 2021, Proceedings 27, 2021
  4. On the Genome Sequence Alignment FPGA Acceleration via KSW2z
    Alberto Zeni, Guido Walter Di Donato, Alessia Della Valle, and 2 more authors
    In 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2023
  5. TSUNAMI: a GPU implementation of the WFA algorithm
    Giulia Gerometta, Alberto Zeni, and Marco D Santambrogio
    In 2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), 2023
  6. Starlight: A kernel optimizer for GPU processing
    Alberto Zeni, Emanuele Del Sozzo, Eleonora D’Arnese, and 2 more authors
    Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2024
  7. Leveraging Difference Recurrence Relations for High-Performance GPU Genome Alignment
    Alberto Zeni, Seth Onken, Marco D Santambrogio, and 1 more author
    In 2024 33rd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), Oct 2024
  8. MTIA 300: Meta’s First Training Chip with Built-in NICs and Collective Offloading Engines
    MTIA Team
    In International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Jul 2026
    Alberto Zeni is a member of the MTIA team that published this paper