Hello

Rolf Riesen

Welcome to my web page. As you can see, I have not put much content here yet.

Interests

I am interested in system software. Basically any software that interacts with hardware or is not very far above that in the software stack. In particular I am interested in software for large-scale, high-performance, parallel systems; what used to be called massively parallel systems. That includes operating systems, message-passing, network protocols (but not TCP/IP. Remember: high performance!), and runtime systems.

Biographical Sketch

The 2019 total solar eclipse in Chile. Unfortunately missed the 2020 one due to COVID travel restrictions.

I grew up in Switzerland and learned electronics there. I got interested in software because I got tired of burning my fingers on a soldering iron and got a master's and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of New Mexico (UNM). My advisor was Barney Maccabe who now leads the Computer Science and Mathematics Division CSM at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In 1990 I started working with a group at Sandia when I was a research assistant at UNM and, after finishing my Master's, got hired as a member of the technical staff in 1993. Throughout this time I designed, implemented, and debugged various pieces of system software starting with SUNMOS on the nCUBE 2 and Puma on the Intel Paragon. We created our own cluster, Cplant, before large clusters were common, and I was involved in the Puma successors: Jaguar, Cougar, and Catamount for the Intel ASCI Red machine and the Cray XT3 Red Storm.

In 2011 I left Sandia for a new job with IBM Research in Ireland. While that was an amazing experience, the work itself was not quite as exciting as I had hoped.

So, in 2014 I joined Intel and we moved to the Portland, Oregon area. I got to help put an OS research team together, architect an HPC multi-OS, and be the teach lead for its implementation. It is slated to be available soon on the Aurora exascale system at Argonne National Laboratory.