Neil McGlohon

Neil McGlohon, Ph.D.

Research Scientist · Software and Systems Engineer

Parallel & Distributed Computing · Neuromorphic Computing

Résumé PDF Full CV w/ Pubs PDF

01 Education

Doctor of Philosophy
Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
June 2021
Master of Science
Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
May 2016
Bachelor of Science
Physics
University of Oklahoma
May 2014

02 Experience

Skills

  • Software Engineering: Linux/MacOS, Python, C/C++, JavaScript/Node.js/Vue.js, Java, GitOps, Git, Jenkins, ArgoCD, CMake, HTTP API/REST, SQL, asynchronous event-driven systems
  • AI/ML: PyTorch, TensorFlow, vLLM, Ray, agentic systems, neuromorphic hardware
  • Cloud & Infrastructure: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Helm, OCI, Docker, Podman, Redis, AMQP, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Grafana, Prometheus, Infiniband & RoCE, S3, AWS, IBM Cloud
  • Parallel & Distributed Computing: HPC, MPI, NCCL, SLURM, cloud-native architectures
IBM
IBM Research
Staff Research Scientist
Aug 2023 — Jul 2026
  • Led engineering effort for IBM AIU NorthPole inference accelerator backed LLM inference engine with continuous batching, showcasing the card's state-of-the-art low latency and energy efficiency. Later developed a NorthPole platform plugin integration to the vLLM engine.
  • Led team of 5 engineers building NorthPole's performance-critical runtime software stack.
  • Designed, developed, deployed, and maintained full-stack, cloud-integrated NorthPole LLM inference service and chat front-end. Integrated service API into production IBM watsonx platform. Inference compute requests were load-balanced by RabbitMQ and fulfilled by distributed AI systems of 288 NorthPole cards featuring Infiniband network links. Systems capable of generating over 500,000 aggregated tokens per second with per-token latency as low as 1 millisecond.
  • Developed NorthPole runtime client/server applications leveraging the YOLO vision models to perform object detection, identification and tracking on real-time video streams, providing over 300 megapixels per-second of image processing while consuming less than 60W of card power.
  • Technical representative and presenter for NorthPole at business development meetings, client outreach, and showcase events.
Research Scientist
Oct 2022 — Aug 2023
  • Developed bespoke OpenShift container request and compute job scheduling service providing individual on-demand sandboxes and coordinated, fair-share, access to IBM AIU NorthPole devices for client event, supporting demands of all 100+ simultaneous active participants.
  • Developed applications to show NorthPole model capabilities in text and image processing tasks.
  • Created and tracked spec-driven tests for validation of NorthPole hardware capabilities.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Center for Computational Innovations
Research Scientist
Jul 2021 — Sep 2022
  • Development and optimization of workloads on the HPC systems for internal and partner research.
  • Served on steering committee of an NSF-funded project-of-projects, mentoring participating graduate students as a subject-matter expert in HPC and AI systems.
  • External collaborator with IBM AI Hardware Center on research into distributed AI training benchmarking and simulation of composable systems.
Software Engineer
Feb 2020 — Jul 2021
  • Maintained the open-source Rensselaer Optimistic Simulation System (ROSS) project, a parallel-discrete-event-simulation engine capable of providing strong-scaling linear speedup even when distributed across 2-million supercomputer CPU cores.
  • Maintained CODES, an open-source framework for massively parallel simulation of HPC communication networks in collaboration with Argonne and Sandia National Laboratories.
  • Fulfilled contracts with external clients and partners, developing tailored software solutions and simulations to capture bleeding-edge experimental HPC data and predictions.
Cisco
Cisco Meraki
Software Engineering Intern
Summer 2017
  • Developed firmware features for Meraki's MR platform access points
  • Designed and built a lockless, thread-safe hashtable using RCU techniques, and upstreamed the contribution to Click, an open-source software-defined router project.
Scientific Service
2019 — Present
Committee work
  • 2025 — ACM SIGSIM PADS, Program Committee Member
  • 2024 — ACM SIGSIM PADS, Program Committee Member
  • 2023 — ACM SIGSIM PADS, Program Committee Member
  • 2023 — ACM SIGSIM PADS, Organizing Committee — Publicity Chair
  • 2023 — IEEE IPDPS ScaDL Workshop, Program Committee Member
  • 2022 — ACM SIGSIM PADS, Organizing Committee — Ph.D. Colloquium Chair
  • 2022 — ACM SIGPLAN BID Workshop, Program Committee Member
  • 2022 — IEEE IPDPS ScaDL Workshop, Program Committee Member
  • 2020-2022 — NSF CAREERS Cyberteam Program, Steering Committee Member
Peer review
  • 2025 — ACM SIGSIM PADS'25
  • 2024 — ACM SIGSIM PADS'24
  • 2023 — ACM SIGSIM PADS'23
  • 2023 — IEEE IPDPS ScaDL Workshop
  • 2022 — ACM SIGPLAN BID Workshop
  • 2022 — IEEE IPDPS ScaDL Workshop
  • 2021 — IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS)
  • 2021 — IEEE European Control Conference (ECC'21)
  • 2020 — IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS)
  • 2019 — ACM SIGSIM PADS'19

03 Selected Projects

Homelab Infrastructure Platform
2022 — Present
  • Built and operate a 4-node ARM Kubernetes cluster running 30+ self-hosted services, each packaged as a Helm chart and continuously deployed from Git by ArgoCD. All secrets injected from 1Password operators to avoid any secret data being committed to Git.
  • Designed a walled-garden network for autonomous AI agents: a deny-by-default restricted VLAN, per-agent scoped Git identities, and a dedicated Jenkins instance running on-demand build pods in an isolated namespace, reducing the potential consequences and risk from errant agents.
  • Serve local LLM inference on RTX 5070 Ti, RTX Pro 2000, and Rockchip RK3588 NPU hosts, powering interactive and unattended coding agents entirely on-premises.

Homelab overview page

04 Publications

05 Talks

  • Guest Lecturer: Introduction to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and High Performance Computing Systems
    Neil McGlohon.
    Parallel Computing, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — February 14-21, 2020
  • CODES-Tracer Tutorial: Enabling HPC Design Space Exploration via Discrete-Event Simulation
    Nikhil Jain and Neil McGlohon.
    HOT-Interconnects — August 2019, San Jose, USA
  • Introducing the Dragonfly Plus Interconnection Model to CODES
    Neil McGlohon and Misbah Mubarak.
    Summer of CODES Workshop — July 2018, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
  • Simulation and Visualization of Custom Neuromorphic Hardware using NeMo
    Mark Plagge, Neil McGlohon, Caitlin Ross, and Christopher D. Carothers.
    Neuromorphic Computing Symposium on Architectures, Models, and Applications — July 2017, Oak Ridge, USA · Extended abstract/presentation
  • Weak anti-localization in ultrathin Sb(111) films
    S. Cairns, N. McGlohon, C. Robison, J. Keay, C. K. Gaspe, K. S. Wickramasinghe, T. D. Mishima, M. B. Santos, and S. Q. Murphy.
    American Physical Society, APS March Meeting — March 2013, Baltimore, MD · Extended abstract/presentation

06 Other experience

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Research Assistant
Aug 2014 — Feb 2020
Advisor: Christopher Carothers
  • Member of the Department of Energy's Exascale Compute Project (ECP), developing and evaluating models of prototypical exascale supercomputer communication network designs through simulation.
  • Fulfilled duties as a research assistant with the SuperNeuro research group, developing models for simulation of neuromorphic systems and associated software. Maintained ROSS and CODES open-source software projects.
  • Primary area of research: high performance/parallel computing. Other areas of interest: distributed systems, cloud computing, machine learning, neuromorphic computing and simulation.
Teaching Assistant, Computer Science 1
Fall 2014
Professor: Sibel Adali
  • Supported the instructor of an introductory Python course.
  • Led lab sessions and discussions, held office hours, and proctored and graded exams/assignments.
University of Oklahoma
Undergraduate Research Assistant
May 2012 — May 2014
Advisor: Sheena Murphy
  • Explored electrical transport properties of quantum-confined antimony measured at cryogenic temperatures.
  • Created laboratory process for measuring differential conductance of a material, allowing for a deeper understanding of the interface between a topological insulator and a superconductor.
National Science Foundation REU
Summer 2012, 2013
Advisor: Sheena Murphy
  • Condensed matter research within NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program including first observations of weak anti-localization in quantum-confined antimony films.
  • Completed a metal-workshop training course to qualify for use of the student shop, fabricating parts for laboratory equipment.
Senior capstone research project
Aug 2013 — May 2014
  • Final year of undergraduate physics work at the University of Oklahoma, overseen by faculty members Sheena Murphy and Matthew Johnson — continuing work from two summer REUs and coursework research. Presentations given and critiqued by advisors and students throughout.
Editor of Photography, Photographer
Aug 2009 — May 2011
The Oklahoma Daily
  • Member of the editorial board. Managed a staff of photographers, using time management and decision-making to meet firm deadlines.
Science Museum Oklahoma
Educator
Jun 2006 — May 2011
  • Conducted and developed teaching material for live science presentations. Helped staff overnight events, facilitating science-based projects for children and their parents.