Howard Pritchard
Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHoward Pritchard is a research scientist based in Santa Fe with over a decade of experience building and optimizing high-performance computing software for national labs and supercomputer vendors. At Los Alamos National Laboratory he focuses on low-level networking and system software, drawing on prior senior engineering roles at Cray and SGI where he worked on performance-critical paths for Cray systems. He is an active open-source contributor to key HPC projects — notably improving the GNI provider in libfabric and maintaining package definitions and build fixes in Spack for Open MPI, UCX, PMIx and related stacks. His work blends deep systems programming (send/receive path optimizations, XPMEM/shared-memory support, address-vector fixes) with practical packaging and cross-compiler troubleshooting. Unusually for an HPC systems engineer, he holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech, a background that underscores his analytical approach to complex performance problems. He brings a rare mix of scientific training and production-scale supercomputing experience to accelerate large-scale computational science.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., Chemistry, B.A., Chemistry at Rice UniversityCalifornia Institute of Technology
German
Github Skills (23)
debug10
package-management10
ucx10
memory-management10
mpi10
hpc10
c1110
autotools10
c1710
performance-optimization10
error-handling10
build-tools10
c-language9
unit-testing9
build-system9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
ofiwg/libfabric
Jan 2015 - Apr 2021
Open Fabric Interfaces
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 352 commits, 630 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Howard Pritchard primarily focused on improving the GNI (Global Network Interface) provider within the libfabric repository. Their work involved fixing bugs, particularly those related to multi-receive, XPMEM (shared memory), and the handling of FI_SOURCE_ERR. They also made performance improvements by optimizing code in the send/receive paths and added support for unassigned CPUs and XPMEM, indicating an effort to improve the performance of GNI in Cray systems. Furthermore, they addressed issues with the Address Vector, and various test-related matters for the tests in the GNI provider.
interfacesminecraftfabric
spack/spack
Feb 2017 - Dec 2022
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:98 reviews, 57 commits, 88 PRs in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Howard primarily contributed to the `spack/spack` repository by adding and updating package definitions for Open MPI, UCX, PMIx, libhio, and other related libraries. Their work involved integrating new releases, incorporating bug fixes, and resolving configuration issues within the Spack package manager framework. They also addressed build issues related to different compilers and architectures.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
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