Ken Raffenetti
Principal Software Engineer at Cornelis Networks
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKen Raffenetti is a Principal Software Engineer with 19 years of experience specializing in high-performance computing systems, low-level communication stacks, and build/release engineering. Based in Chicago, he spent nearly two decades at Argonne National Laboratory advancing MPICH and libfabric portability, performance, and long-term maintainability before joining Cornelis Networks. Ken is a hands-on systems architect who has contributed substantive fixes and feature work to flagship open-source projects like MPICH and Spack—adding multi-platform support, CUDA/ROCm adjustments, UCX integration, and Mellanox HCOLL enablement. He combines deep expertise in compiler and build-system troubleshooting with pragmatic performance tuning for scalable communication layers, and he’s known for quietly addressing cross-platform fragility that keeps scientific software running reliably.
19 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (25)
multithreading10
architecture10
freebsd10
memory-management10
build-system10
c1110
autotools10
c1710
package-manager-tool10
system10
performance-optimization10
package-manager10
architectures10
spack10
hpc9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
pmodels/mpich
Oct 2014 - Jan 2023
Official MPICH Repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:27 releases, 1872 reviews, 3203 commits in 8 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ken primarily contributed to the MPICH codebase, focusing on low-level features and optimization within the communication layers. They implemented improvements for performance and scalability, addressing threading, memory management, and communication protocol design. Their work is evidenced by changes that include refactoring code, enhancing performance, adding new features, and debugging existing functions. The user actively participated in code refinement and stability.
fortranhpcmpic
spack/spack
Sep 2017 - Sep 2022
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer / Build & Release Engineer
Back-end Developer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:65 reviews, 21 commits, 33 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Ken has primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the MPICH package within the Spack package manager. Their work includes adding new versions of MPICH, including major releases and patch versions. The user also implemented features like the addition of dependencies (e.g., UCX) and variants, and also made adjustments to the configuration options, specifically addressing CUDA and ROCm support. This user also added support for Mellanox HCOLL.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
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