Matt Thompson
Lead Scientific Programmer Analyst at Science Systems and Applications, Inc (SSAI)
Alexandria, Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMatt Thompson is a Lead Scientific Programmer/Analyst with 11+ years translating advanced scientific algorithms into high-performance production code for NASA and national labs. He specializes in porting and optimizing legacy Fortran climate models (GEOS GCM) to modern accelerators—delivering 10–15x kernel speedups on NVIDIA GPUs and effective hybrid MPI+OpenMP scaling on Intel Xeon Phi—while managing complex build ecosystems and provenance with git/CVS. His background in theoretical chemistry and parallelized algorithm development informs a pragmatic approach to scientific software, from HDF5/NetCDF-enabled data stacks to package management contributions in high-impact open-source projects like Spack. Comfortable across compilers and supercomputing platforms, he pairs deep domain expertise with hands-on systems engineering to make cutting-edge modeling reproducible and performant. An often-unseen strength is his track record of enabling collaborator workflows—creating and maintaining repositories and build tooling that keep multi-institution science moving.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
BA Chemistry, BA Chemistry at Colorado CollegePh.D. Theoretical Chemistry, Ph.D. Theoretical Chemistry at University of Colorado Boulder
English, Spanish
Github Skills (8)
packaging10
package-management10
package10
python9
build-tools9
scientific-computing8
fortran7
hpc6
Programming languages (27)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
May 2017 - Jan 2023
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:49 reviews, 4 commits, 69 PRs in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Matt's commits primarily focus on modifying and improving the `setup-env.csh` script, a critical component for setting up the Spack environment. They addressed issues related to module root configuration and error handling when the SPACK_ROOT environment variable is not set. Additionally, the user contributed to adding and updating package definitions within the Spack ecosystem, including adding new packages related to the Goddard-Fortran-Ecosystem, fixing and adding versions to several packages. This indicates involvement in the build and package management aspects of the Spack project.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
mathomp4/labeltest
Sep 2019 - Oct 2021
Testing the label gist
Contributions:3 releases, 58 PRs, 47 pushes in 2 years
gisttesting
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