Christos Kotselidis

Christos Kotselidis is an Associate Professor at the University of Manchester's School of Computer Science and serves as Chief Engineer at Pierer Innovation (previously mentioned as KTM Innovation). He leads the TornadoVM project, a groundbreaking Java Virtual Machine for heterogeneous hardware acceleration. His work bridges academia and industry, focusing on hardware/software co-design for virtual machines and embedded systems.

His research spans chip design, micro-architecture, compilers, virtual machines, and garbage collection. Dr. Kotselidis has pioneered work in heterogeneous computing, particularly in accelerating Java applications on GPUs, FPGAs, and RISC-V architectures. His team's recent development of GPULlama3.java demonstrates the practical application of his research in bringing LLM inference to pure Java with GPU acceleration.

His publications show a consistent focus on bridging hardware capabilities with managed runtime systems. The research trajectory reveals increasing sophistication in handling memory hierarchies, parallelism, and cross-architecture execution. His work has significant implications for high-performance computing, AI acceleration, and sustainable computing practices.

Dr. Kotselidis actively contributes to the academic community as a program committee member for conferences like ISMM and as an organizer for workshops including VMIL and MoreVMs. He's also involved in EU-funded projects like AERO and DARE, which focus on European processor initiatives and software ecosystems.

As project lead for TornadoVM, he mentors a research team at Manchester including Michalis Papadimitriou, Mary Xekalaki, and Thanos Stratikopoulos. His lab (Beehive Lab) develops open-source tools that are widely used in both academic and industrial settings for heterogeneous computing.