Alireza Olama

What I work on

News

• Jul 2026Joined QuTwo in Helsinki as a Member of Technical Staff.
• Jul 2026Presented PsFiT at TKTP2026, the 43rd Annual Symposium of Computer Science, in Turku.
• Dec 2025PruneX preprint online: hierarchical communication-efficient distributed CNN training.
• Autumn 2025Launched the master's-level GPU Programming course at Åbo Akademi University.
• Spring 2025Ran an HPC workshop on the Mahti supercomputer for graduate students and researchers.

Selected work

• PruneX

  Hierarchical communication-efficient distributed CNN training. Co-designs a structured-sparsity algorithm (H-SADMM) with cluster topology, so the pruning decision and the Allreduce pattern reinforce each other.

  CodePaper

• PsFiT

  Distributed sparse machine learning training under a hard ℓ₀ constraint via Bi-cADMM, with no relaxation. Data is sharded across nodes while features are partitioned across GPUs.

  Code

• SCOT

  C++17 distributed solver that reformulates sparse convex problems exactly as mixed-integer programs (DiPOA, DiHOA). Benchmarked on 140 problems against state-of-the-art MINLP solvers.

  Code

• SHOT(contributor)

  Gave this COIN-OR convex MINLP solver a thread-pool execution model, so primal heuristics run concurrently with the dual search instead of blocking it.

  Code

Selected publications

1. PsFiT: A GPU-Accelerated Distributed Framework for Scalable Sparse Machine Learning TrainingWith A. Lundell, J. Kronqvist, E. Ahmadi, J. Björkqvist. TKTP 2026.
2. PruneX: A Hierarchical Communication-Efficient System for Distributed CNN Training with Structured PruningWith A. Lundell, I. El Hajj, J. Lilius, J. Björkqvist. arXiv:2512.14628, 2025.
3. A GPU-Accelerated Bi-linear ADMM Algorithm for Distributed Sparse Machine LearningWith A. Lundell, J. Kronqvist, E. Ahmadi, E. Camponogara. arXiv:2405.16267, 2024.
4. Sparse Convex Optimization Toolkit: A Mixed-Integer FrameworkWith E. Camponogara, J. Kronqvist. Optimization Methods and Software, 38(6), 2023.
5. A Distributed Primal Outer Approximation Algorithm for Sparse Convex Programming with Separable StructuresWith E. Camponogara, P. R. C. Mendes. Journal of Global Optimization, 86(3), 2023.
6. A Tracking Augmented Lagrangian Method for ℓ₀ Sparse Consensus OptimizationWith G. Carnevale, G. Notarstefano, E. Camponogara. CoDIT 2023.

All 15 publications on Google Scholar →