Brian Barrett is a Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services with 15+ years building high-performance computing and machine learning networking software, notably enabling HPC on Graviton, Elastic Fabric Adapter, and AWS Nitro offloads. His career spans national labs and cloud scale systems—contributing to Open MPI, launching Road Runner support, and shaping one-sided communication and lightweight tasking for exascale-class systems. He combines deep systems research (PhD-level work on MPI and SHMEM paradigms) with hands-on cloud engineering, driving infrastructure, release automation, and pre-release verification for projects like AWS ParallelCluster. Known for pragmatic fixes that improve portability and debuggability across platforms, he brings a rare blend of low-level C/C++ expertise and large-scale cloud networking design.
15 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree, Computer Science, Master’s Degree, Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science and Engineering, Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science and Engineering at University of Notre Dame
Contributions:5 releases, 729 reviews, 1286 commits in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Brian focused on maintaining and improving Open MPI, primarily by fixing bugs and improving the code quality. Their contributions included fixing platform detection issues on FreeBSD, improving BTL TCP, updating the Authors file, and removing unnecessary atomic or memory barrier macros. The user's work involved modifications to C and C++ code.
AWS ParallelCluster is an AWS supported Open Source cluster management tool to deploy and manage HPC clusters in the AWS cloud.
Role in this project:
Cloud Engineer / DevOps Engineer
Contributions:1 release, 28 commits, 40 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the infrastructure and release process of the AWS ParallelCluster project. Their work included updating version numbers, modifying configuration files, and making changes to the documentation. The user also added a script for converting AMI lists and developed a pre-release verification test suite. Furthermore, they fixed bugs related to configuration and improved the debugging information during cluster creation and release.
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Brian Barrett - Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services