James Simmons
System Programmer at Self - Employed
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Simmons is a seasoned system programmer with 12+ years of hands-on experience porting and optimizing Linux across devices from cell phones to supercomputers. Currently at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he focuses on scaling and performance of Linux on HPC systems while maintaining a long history of kernel and open-source contributions. He was a former maintainer of the Linux framebuffer layer and has deep expertise in kernel subsystems, embedded builds, and device ports dating back to early PDA and MIPS platforms. His background spans commercial device stacks (Blu-ray/OCAP), embedded accelerators, and tooling for custom build systems, reflecting both low-level driver work and system integration. Based in Knoxville, TN, James blends practical hardware-first instincts with a decade-plus of collaborative open-source stewardship. A less obvious strength is his consistent pattern of bridging experimental hardware into production-ready kernels, making him a go-to engineer for unusual platform bring-ups.
12 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
University at Buffalo
Github Skills (12)
freebsd9
linux9
openzfs9
moto8
hpc-applications6
benchmarking6
kernel5
benchmark5
yaml4
hpc3
rust3
libyaml3
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
ORNL-TechInt/lustre
Jul 2014 - Sep 2014
Contributions:26 commits in 2 months
jasimmons1973/lustre
Feb 2020 - Feb 2026
Contributions:55 pushes, 3 branches in 6 years 1 month
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