Aaron T Barlow

Bio

Aaron Barlow is a HPC Software Engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he specializes in designing, building, and deploying operational software to support the Oak Ridge Leadership Facility’s HPC ecosystem.

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from East Tennessee State University in 2020. Before joining ORNL full-time, he interned there year-round for four years, focusing on HPC operational software development. In the summer of 2019, he interned at Bank of America, where he developed a natural language processing model to automate entity recognition and document categorization.

Aaron is also actively involved in his community, demonstrating his commitment through mentoring roles and participation in initiatives like the PEARC Student Volunteer Committee and student programs at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS).

Outside of work, Aaron enjoys volleyball, bouldering, dancing, playing piano, exercising, reading, traveling, and promoting open science.

Professional Experience

HPC Software Engineer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (June 2020 - Present)

• Development and maintenance of HPC-centric services, applications, and business intelligence tools.
• Contributed to the development of Scalable Protected Infrastructure (SPI), enabling NCCS to support sensitive research with ITAR, PHI, PII, and HIPAA compliance, enabling researchers to process protected data at scale.
• Finished the development of myOLCF, taking over development on a tight 4-month deadline, delivering the NCCS’s HPC self-management and monitoring application on schedule: https://my.olcf.ornl.gov.
• Optimized myOLCF’s performance by improving application responsiveness by 71.8% in 2021 and 155% in 2023.
• Designed and developed the NCCS's Smart Facility Backend, which ingests compute, data, I/O, and benchmark efficiency metrics and makes it available on a frontend via API endpoints.
• Mentored interns and students. Led, co-led, and organized multiple student-focused workshops at ORNL, and at the PEARC and Supercomputing (SC) conferences, fostering the development of future HPC professionals.

ML Engineer Intern

Bank of America (June 2019 - Aug. 2019)

• Developed and deployed a natural language processing (NLP) model that achieved an F1 score of 96%, resulting in over $20 million in annual savings. The model extracts entities such as a person’s full name, phone numbers, addresses, account numbers, and monetary amounts from millions of documents.

Software Developer Intern

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (May 2015 - May 2019)

• Year-round development and maintenance of HPC-centric services, applications, and business intelligence tools.
• Developed an automatic emailing system to standardize communication and streamline access to supercomputers.
• Designed and deployed a dynamic WordPress plugin to sync and display HPC metrics: https://olcf.ornl.gov.

Education

East Tennessee State University (2017 – 2020)

Bachelor's degree Computer Science 3.94 GPA

Pellissippi State Community College (2015 – 2017)

Associate of Science - AS Computer and Information Sciences, General 3.84

Professional Affiliations

ORNL Pathways to Computing Internship Program (PCIP) Workshop Chair  |  ORNL  |  2022 – Present

Student Program Committee Chair  |  PEARC (Advanced Research Computing Conference)  |  2021 – Present

ACM President  |  East Tennessee State University  |  2019 – 2020

Ethical Hacking Vice President  |  East Tennessee State University  |  2018 – 2019

Publications

Other Publications