Technological advancements in integrated circuits and computer organization have been leading to better high performance computing (HPC) systems at the cost of more complex designs including specialized networks, hierarchical and distributed shared memory, accelerators with their own complex subsystems, among others. In these systems, achieving high performance and reliability have been important objectives for a while, and energy efficiency has also become an issue in recent years. With these objectives in mind, I have been working with collaborators in different scenarios by trying to understand the behavior of applications and the architecture of the computing systems where they execute, and by combining this information to identify issues and propose new solutions. In this presentation, I will focus on some of my experience with the development of machine topology-aware global scheduling algorithms, and I will discuss future plans related to hybrid-memory systems.