Ron Brightwell

Activities

• Invited Program Committee, Programming Environments and System Software, 2025 ISC High Performance
• Program Committee, IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects (HotI’25)
• Vice Chair for Programming Models and System Software, 2025 Supercomputing Asia conference (SCA’25)
• Program Committee, System Software, 2025 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS’25)
• Program Committee, 2025 ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC’25)

Bio

I received my BS in mathematics in 1991 and my MS in computer science in 1994 from Mississippi State University. I joined Sandia National Laboratories in 1995 after serving as a graduate research assistant in the system software thrust at the MSU/NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation (now known as the High Performance Computing Collaboratory). While at Sandia, I’ve worked on several research and development projects associated with system software and high-performance networking for large-scale, massively parallel, distributed-memory, scientific computing systems. I’ve designed and developed high-performance implementations of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard on several platforms, including the Cray T3D and T3E, the Intel Paragon and TeraFLOPS (ASCI/Red), Sandia’s Computational Plant Linux clusters, and the Cray Red Storm (XT3). I have contributed to the MPI-2, MPI-3, and MPI-4 specifications. My research has impacted HPC network technologies from several vendors, including HPE, Eviden, Cornelis, and Nvidia. I currently lead the Scalable System Software Department in the Center for Computing Research at Sandia.

Awards and Recognitions

• Best Paper Nominee, “A Tale of Two Systems: Using Containers to Deploy HPC Applications on Supercomputers and Clouds,” IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, December 2017.
• Best Paper Nominee, “sPIN: High-Performance Streaming Processing in the Network,” IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, November 2017.
• US Patent 8,566,536 “Direct Access Inter-Process Shared Memory”, October 2012.
• US Patent 8,170,041, “Message Passing with Queue Traversal,” May 2012.
• Federal Laboratory Consortium Excellence in Technology Transfer, “Red Storm Massively Parallel Processor Supercomputing Architecture”, April 2010.
• R&D100 Award, “Catamount N-Way Lightweight Kernel”, October 2009.
• Best Paper Nominee, “Characterizing Application Sensitivity to OS Interference Using Kernel-Level Noise Injection,” International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC’08), November 2008.
• Best Paper, “An Evaluation of the Impacts of Network Bandwidth and Dual-Core Processors on Scalability,” International Supercomputing Conference, June 2007.
• Senior Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), February 2007.
• Senior Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), November 2006.
• Lockheed Martin Nova Award for Teamwork, “For designing and deploying a new massively parallel supercomputer, Red Storm …”, October 2006.
• Distinguished Engineering Fellow, Mississippi State University, February 2003.