Bio
Brian has been involved in HPC for more than 25 years, starting at DOE Ames Lab as an undergrad. He eventually took an internship at IBM that became a full-time job for nearly 10 years. He worked on communication libraries and application porting for the BlueGene L, P, and Q supercomputers, eventually becoming the communications team lead. He received nearly 100 patents for work at IBM and was named as an IBM Master Inventor and served on multiple Invention Review Boards.
Brian came to Oak Ridge National Labs after the BlueGene program ended. He started in the TechInt group and eventually transitioned to the Advanced Data and Workflow group at NCCS, primarily working on post-processing data analysis and diagnostics for the ACME climate modeling project. He took a couple years off to work at Mellanox, where he was involved in applications porting of climate and weather codes, IO analysis and optimizations, and optimizations to the communications stack for Infiniband clusters.
He came back to the lab in the User Assistance and Outreach group, helping OLCF users get the maximum science out of our HPC resources. He was also the user support liaison to the Air Force Weather Wing machines hosted by the lab and helped with the NOAA machine as well.
He took an opportunity with Cornelis Networks, providing technical guidance and working with customers and former colleagues from IBM and ORNL on the Omni-Path networking hardware.
Brian is back at ORNL in the Technology Integration group, working on various networking problems in High-Performance Computing, benchmarking, and profiling. He is active in the MPI Forum and SCinet, the networking side of the Supercomputing Conference.
When not at work, he can frequently be found operating steam traction engines at tractor shows around the country or working on railroad equipment — including restoring historic 1940s vintage passenger rail equipment for the local railroad museum and working on scale model railroading at home. He is also heavily involved in FIRST robotics, mentoring a local Knoxville team, serving on the planning committee for the Tennessee regional competition, and serving as the lead robot inspector for Tennessee and inspecting robots in multiple states.