Robert Latham
Principal Software Development Specialist at Argonne National Laboratory
Greater Chicago Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRobert Latham is a Principal Software Development Specialist with 23 years of experience focused on high-performance I/O for scientific computing, currently leading work on MPI, ROMIO, parallel file systems and benchmarking at Argonne National Laboratory. He combines deep C and systems expertise with practical build and packaging skills, contributing to widely used projects such as MPICH, the IOR benchmark, and Spack to improve robustness, portability, and noncontiguous I/O performance. His contributions range from fixing subtle runtime bugs and memory leaks to enabling collective metadata for HDF5 and broadening libfabric support in package ecosystems. Based in the Greater Chicago area, he brings a rare blend of low-level MPI internals knowledge and hands-on build engineering, making distributed I/O both faster and more reliable for scientific workflows. Notably, his work includes portable backtrace routines and targeted tests that surfaced tricky external32 file I/O bugs, reflecting an attention to edge cases that pays dividends in large-scale HPC deployments.
23 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Hershey High SchoolMasters, Computer Engineering, Masters, Computer Engineering at Lehigh University
Stackoverflow
5,163reputation
999kreached
174answers
12questions
mpi
top-1%
Github Skills (40)
package-management10
mpi10
hpc10
c1110
mio10
c1710
package-manager-tool10
message-passing10
iio10
build-automation10
nio10
package-manager10
debug9
performance-monitor9
performance-analytics9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
hpc/ior
Apr 2013 - Sep 2022
IOR and mdtest
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 13 commits, 12 PRs in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily focused on improving the IOR (IO performance benchmark) project by addressing memory leaks, fixing build issues, and enhancing code robustness. Their contributions included cleaning up MPI resources, making the code more tolerant of whitespace in hint files, and incorporating an option to enable collective metadata for HDF5. They also fixed a "number of arguments doesn’t match prototype" error and worked on noncontiguous I/O functionality.
benchmarkinghpc-applicationsrustbenchmarkhpc
pmodels/mpich
Aug 2014 - Sep 2022
Official MPICH Repository
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:57 reviews, 312 commits, 72 PRs in 8 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Robert primarily contributed to the MPICH repository, focusing on enhancing the Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation. Their work included addressing potential bugs related to divide-by-zero errors, implementing a portable backtrace routine, and optimizing code for improved performance and stability. They also fixed issues related to data conversion in ROMIO, and provided a test case to exercise external32 paths and address external32 bugs in file I/O.
fortranhpcmpic
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