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 11 years of experience and more than two decades in high-performance computing and systems software. He transitioned from roles at Cray, SGI, and Cray Research into research work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, bringing deep expertise in HPC networking and performance tuning. His open-source contributions include substantive backend work on libfabric’s GNI provider—fixing multi-receive, XPMEM, and addressing FI_SOURCE_ERR—and maintaining critical packaging and build support in the widely used Spack package manager. That blend of low-level network stack improvements and packaging across architectures highlights a rare combination of kernel-to-distribution systems knowledge. Trained as a chemist with a Ph.D. from Caltech and a BA from Rice, he applies scientific rigor to software engineering problems and often focuses on reliability and measurable performance gains. Colleagues would describe him as a practical problem-solver who reduces complex HPC issues to reproducible fixes and incremental optimizations.
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 (22)
debug10
package-management10
ucx10
memory-management10
mpi10
hpc10
c1110
autotools10
c1710
performance-optimization10
error-handling10
build-tools10
c-language9
unit-testing9
multithreading9
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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