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High Performance Computing

My way into HPC began as plain curiosity about how you actually program a GPU, the same kind of chip that runs the video games I grew up on. That question led me to supercomputers, which are racks of the same silicon doing work far heavier than rendering frames. Half a decade in, what still excites me most is the chase, hunting performance through layers of code and silicon until I find the one function that's quietly bottlenecking the entire pipeline.

In the same stretch of work I'm hunting a slow function, keeping a cluster healthy, and redesigning a CI pipeline that thirty applications run through. The plan for my career is to get good at these machines and help other people get good at them too.

Chips stopped getting faster by themselves a while back, so most of the speed from here on has to be found in software. Looking for it is my job, and this page has the roles I've done it in, the awards, my two degrees, the research, and some writing.

Work Experience

AMD logo

AMD

Current
Full-time
Aug 2021 – Present · 5 yrs 3 mos
Bangalore, IN

Sr. Software System Designer

Dec 2025 – Present · 11 mos

Recently promoted - highlights to follow.

Software System Designer 2

May 2023 – Nov 2025 · 2 yrs 7 mos
  • Owned GROMACS, HMMER and SPEC MPI in every Zen Software Studio release from 4.2 to 5.2, getting each to build through Spack and through Kaveri, fixing the performance problems that turned up, and coordinating the public docs on building them with Spack.
  • Designed and built the team's CI platform on Jenkins and Kaveri, automating more than thirty HPC applications across more than ten toolchains and more than eighty workloads, which cut the effort in every release cycle by a large margin. Spotlight Award, Q4 2024.
  • Led Zen Software Studio operations for releases 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2, running the releases and reporting their performance numbers, and onboarded two contractors so the work could scale.
  • Closed a 4 to 5% GROMACS performance gap against Intel's oneAPI, after finding its root cause together with the AOCC and Performance Analysis teams.
  • Led Spack adoption across the organisation, writing recipes for our HPC applications, making them work on the MI300 so it could be validated, and contributing the internal recipes upstream to the public Spack project. Spotlight Award, Q2 2023.
  • Automated how we make and submit Spack recipe changes, so that upstream contributions became routine. Director Spotlight Award, Q1 2025.
  • Automated Dhruva1's cluster deployment with Ansible. Spotlight Award, Q3 2023.
  • Started a collaboration between AMD and EPCC, including a joint dissertation proposal, which widened AMD's presence in academic HPC.

Software System Designer 1

Aug 2021 – Apr 2023 · 1 yr 9 mos
  • Characterised AVX-512's effect on GROMACS and profiled the application on fourth-generation EPYC, and the results fed into Zen Software Studio's optimisations for those chips.
  • Wrote a tool that containerises HPC applications automatically, cutting deployment effort by over 70%. Spotlight Award, Q3 2022.
  • Built an HPC cluster from scratch, and kept the team's hardware and software running.
  • Built an OpenStack proof of concept that put the organisation's CI, build delivery and performance validation hardware on one platform.
  • Wrote and maintained our first Spack recipes for the HPC applications, which the later organisation-wide adoption grew out of.
NVIDIA logo

NVIDIA

Internship
Jan 2020 – Jul 2021 · 1 yr 7 mos
Bangalore, IN

HPC/AI Research Intern
  • Benchmarked DFT-FE's performance and scaling on a DGX A100 cluster, where it ran at twice the speed of the older DGX V100 cluster.
  • Helped the HPC team port the CFS code to GPUs with OpenACC, then profiled it.
  • Researched and built an Indian classical music generator on MuseGAN.
  • Implemented several machine learning algorithms on GPUs for RAPIDS and SimNet, and profiled them.

Awards & Recognition

  • Hackathons

    · AMD
    1 award · 2026
    • Winner, CSG AI Hackathon 2026 Feb 2026

      Won with "From Few Experts to Many: AI-Democratized Kaveri Expertise".

  • Spotlight Awards

    · AMD
    6 awards · 2022–2026
    • Director Spotlight Award, Q2 2026 Jun 2026

      For Kaveri's web front end, built on a short deadline.

    • Director Spotlight Award, Q1 2025 Mar 2025

      For automating Spack recipe changes.

    • Spotlight Award, Q4 2024 Dec 2024

      For the HPC team's CI platform on Jenkins and Kaveri.

    • Spotlight Award, Q3 2023 Sep 2023

      For the Ansible deployment of the Dhruva1 cluster.

    • Spotlight Award, Q2 2023 Jun 2023

      For Spack recipes that got our HPC applications validated on the MI300.

    • Spotlight Award, Q3 2022 Sep 2022

      For arguing that HPC applications should be benchmarked in Docker containers.

  • Director of Engineering Appreciation

    · NVIDIA
    Jul 2021

    Given by the Director of Engineering, for my work as an intern.

Education

  • University of Edinburgh

    Sep 2023 – Sep 2026
    M.Sc. · High Performance Computing

    High Performance Computing at EPCC, studied online from Bangalore while working at AMD. My dissertation looked at what hardware counters can and cannot tell you about a program, and it's under Research.

  • PES University

    Aug 2017 – Aug 2021
    B.Tech. · Computer Science and Engineering

    Computer Science and Engineering at PES University, Bangalore, four years. The access-control paper under Research was written here.

Research

Writing