Daniel Barry

Congratulations on your PhD achievement. Can you catch us up on your academic journey that led to your current role as a Research Scientist?

Thank you so much! Throughout my graduate studies, I did various experiments using the Performance API (PAPI), such as designing benchmarking strategies for accurate uncore-event monitoring. I also developed a methodology to automatically compose performance metrics using natively available hardware events. This allowed me to garner familiarity with PAPI’s structure and innerworkings.

What are you currently working on at ICL?

Now, as a Research Scientist, I am developing new features for PAPI, such as integrating AMD’s ROCTX library with PAPI’s rocp_sdk component, as well as developing infrastructure to automate creating tables of performance events that PAPI can expose.

What are you most interested in exploring next in your research or what research areas are you most excited about looking forward?

I am very interested in developing support for PC sampling in the PAPI framework. In addition, I would like to do some experiments utilizing the various power-monitoring capabilities of PAPI.

What advice would you give to future students at ICL who hope to follow a similar path as yours?

I would tell students two pieces of advice. (1) When it comes to coursework, pace yourself! Staying up all night working on projects and assignments sometimes feels necessary, but doing so can have a more negative academic AND research impact than simply submitting an incomplete or imperfect assignment earlier on. (2) Have humility in the face of new evidence in research. Sometimes results from experiments are unexpected. It is important to honor newly acquired knowledge because it can lead to richer and more nuanced conclusions and models.

What are some of your interests or hobbies outside of work?

I really enjoy swimming, cooking, watching movies, and playing video games. Throughout grad school, I accrued a backlog of movies to watch, and I have been enjoying catching up!

In your 2018 interview, you said that if you weren’t working at ICL, you’d want to be working here. How does it feel to have made that a reality?

Continuing my career with ICL has been very gratifying. It is an honor to work with the PAPI team, and we have great synergy. Having my role at ICL is rewarding because I am able to contribute to HPC technology through my research and software development.