Peña earned his Ph.D. in advanced computer systems in 2013 with a thesis on ​“GPU Virtualization for High Performance Clusters,” which he pursued in a joint collaboration between the Technical University of Valencia and the Jaume I University. He was the original developer and architect of rCUDA, a middleware framework for remote GPU virtualization. Subsequently, he acted as development supervisor of the project. His work has appeared in more than 30 refereed journals and conference proceedings.

Peña currently is a postdoctoral appointee in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division. As part of the MPICH team, he is driving the heterogeneous memory and accelerator computing areas of research within the programming models and runtime systems group.