Mike Renfro
Director, Research Computing And Data
Cookeville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMike Renfro is a research computing and HPC leader with over two decades of experience bridging mechanical engineering research and high-performance Linux/Solaris systems administration. As Director of Research Computing and Data at Tennessee Tech, he has built campus-wide HPC services, led multi-PI NSF proposals, and driven Science DMZ and data-transfer capabilities that support cross-college research. His background as an R&D engineer and PhD researcher gives him deep domain expertise in finite element analysis, fracture mechanics databases, and instrumentation alongside production-grade cluster and build-system work. A pragmatic engineer, he contributes to Spack—helping package and build complex scientific software—demonstrating both hands-on build engineering and an eye for reproducible research environments. He is known for turning lab-scale experimental setups and custom MATLAB/LabVIEW tools into scalable, supported infrastructure for hundreds of researchers and students. Based in Cookeville, he combines faculty-facing collaboration with vendor and proposal leadership to expand campus cyberinfrastructure.
14 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, ENGINEERING, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, ENGINEERING at Tennessee Technological University
English
Stackoverflow
101reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (8)
build-tools10
package-manager10
package-management10
python10
makefile9
linux9
scientific-computing8
hpc7
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
Aug 2022 - Aug 2022
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Backend & Build Engineer
Backend & Build EngineerContributions:1 review, 1 commit, 7 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributes to the Spack package manager by modifying package definitions and build configurations. Their work includes adding new versions of existing packages, fixing dependencies, and adjusting build parameters. They also demonstrate a knowledge of the build process by modifying Makefiles and implementing variants for different configurations. These changes directly impact the functionality and compatibility of software packages managed by Spack.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
mikerenfro/puppet-pxe
Apr 2020 - May 2023
Puppet module for deploying a PXE boot server
Contributions:2 PRs, 65 pushes, 13 branches in 3 years 1 month
deployingpuppetpuppet-modulepxe-bootpxe
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.