Paul Coffman
Principal Scientific Applications Engineering Specialist
La Crosse, Wisconsin, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolPaul Coffman is a Principal Scientific Applications Engineering Specialist with over 25 years in high-performance computing and enterprise IT, now applying deep systems knowledge at Argonne National Laboratory. He began at IBM through a high-school mentorship and progressed through roles spanning OS/400 tools, data mining, web performance, and long-term HPC software and performance engineering for Blue Gene and POWER systems. Paul specializes in scientific application enablement—working directly with scientists on codes like NAMD, LAMMPS and AutoDock—and has co-authored performance work for multilevel parallelization of AutoDock. His open-source contributions include low-level MPI/ROMIO and libfabric work to improve RMA, file I/O aggregation, and Blue Gene/Q provider capabilities, directly improving scalability and filesystem compatibility. Based in La Crosse, WI, he blends hands-on kernel-to-application debugging with cross-disciplinary science literacy across biology, chemistry and physics, enabling better use of supercomputers. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex scientific needs into practical performance wins across software stacks.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Compute, BS, Compute at University of Minnesota Duluth
Github Skills (17)
rdma10
fortran10
memory-management10
mpi10
cluster-computing10
hpc10
c1110
c1710
parallel-computing10
network-protocol10
protocols10
scientific-computing10
apidoc9
performance-optimization9
api9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
pmodels/mpich
Mar 2016 - Apr 2018
Official MPICH Repository
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:56 commits, 11 PRs, 89 comments in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on enhancing the ROMIO component within the MPICH repository. Their contributions involved fixing write aggregation issues, generalizing environment variables for collective aggregation tuning, and optimizing one-sided write operations, including hole checking and file striping support. These changes improved performance and compatibility with different file systems. Additionally, the user addressed memory management issues and improved the overall efficiency of one-sided write operations.
fortranhpcmpic
ofiwg/libfabric
Aug 2016 - Sep 2017
Open Fabric Interfaces
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:69 commits, 32 PRs, 12 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Paul Paul Coffman primarily contributed to the development of the BGQ (Blue Gene/Q) provider within the libfabric project. His work involved implementing various components and protocols related to the BGQ architecture, including the integration of memory fifo structures and support for different data transfer and communication patterns. He also focused on adding and optimizing code for remote memory access (RMA) operations, including read and write operations, and implemented changes to enable the FI_DIRECTED_RECEIVE and FI_REMOTE_CQ_DATA capabilities. The user was instrumental in enabling the BGQ provider with enhancements to the core libfabric framework.
interfacesminecraftfabric
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