Wei-keng Liao
Research Professor at Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois, United States
Summary
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SeniorWei-keng Liao is a Research Professor at Northwestern University with 18 years of experience designing and implementing high-performance parallel I/O systems. He is an active developer and maintainer of Parallel netCDF (PnetCDF) and has contributed significant back-end improvements to foundational HPC projects including MPICH/ROMIO, HDF5, netCDF-C, and the IOR benchmark. His work focuses on robustness and scalability—fixing integer overflow issues, improving MPI-IO hint handling, and preventing resource leaks in parallel environments—to enable reliable large-scale scientific data workflows. Based in Evanston, he combines academic research with hands-on engineering, shipping production-grade patches and tests across multiple widely used repositories. Notably, his contributions touch both core libraries and benchmarking tools, improving interoperability and performance for scientific applications that handle very large datasets.
18 years of coding experience
Github Skills (18)
hdf10
filesystem10
lib10
testing10
fortran10
mpi10
c1110
data-structure10
c1710
parallel-computing10
data-structures10
netcdf10
error-handling9
database8
databases8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
Unidata/netcdf-c
Jun 2017 - Oct 2022
Official GitHub repository for netCDF-C libraries and utilities.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 105 commits, 58 PRs in 5 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Wei-keng primarily contributed to the netCDF-C library by implementing and modifying core functionalities. They focused on improving the handling of 64-bit integers, optimizing data structures, and addressing potential overflow issues. The user also made changes to ensure the library's compatibility with PnetCDF and improved error reporting, demonstrating a focus on code quality and performance. Further, the user added test programs.
unidatasciencenetcdfunidata-netcdfatmosphere
hpc/ior
Jun 2019 - Dec 2021
IOR and mdtest
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 1 comment in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Wei-keng contributed to the IOR (Input/Output) benchmark tool, specifically modifying the code to integrate with the PnetCDF library. Their work focused on adding features to print MPI-IO hints, synchronizing the file system, handling error codes, managing file deletion, and enabling support for large variables. The changes involved modifying existing functions within the `aiori-NCMPI.c` file to incorporate new PnetCDF functionality. These contributions likely improved IOR's ability to work with PnetCDF and large files.
benchmarkinghpc-applicationsrustbenchmarkhpc
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