Neil McGlohon

Neil McGlohon

Research Scientist

Parallel & Distributed Computing · Neuromorphic Computing

GitHub Résumé PDF Full CV PDF

01 Education

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

02 Experience

Featured accomplishments

  • Led the design and development of a purpose-built LLM inference engine to provide generative AI inference workloads powered by IBM AIU NorthPole hardware, defining the state of the art.
  • Demonstrated rack-scale distributed AI system deployments of 288 NorthPole cards, collectively producing over 500,000 generated tokens/sec while maintaining per-token latencies as low as 1 millisecond.
  • Designed, developed, and deployed a cloud-native stack on OpenShift/Kubernetes to expose and control access to IBM AIU NorthPole-powered LLM inference appliances; integrated the services into the IBM watsonx product.
  • Primary maintainer of CODES, an open-source C/C++ project for massively parallel simulation of HPC communication networks. Collaborated with researchers from Argonne and Sandia National Laboratories.
  • Steering-committee member on an NSF-funded project-of-projects; subject-matter expert and mentor in HPC and AI systems for participating graduate students.
Staff Research Scientist — IBM Research
Oct 2022 - Jul 2026
  • Team-lead role driving development of the runtime stack and SDK packaging/release process for the IBM AIU NorthPole accelerator card: a brain-inspired computing device for state-of-the-art AI inference, delivering increased performance at significantly reduced energy usage versus comparable GPUs and neural accelerators.
  • Subject-matter expert in parallel and distributed computing systems, containerization and orchestration, and LLM inference serving.
  • Technical representative for IBM AIU NorthPole during international business-development and client-outreach events and meetings.
  • Developed and maintained a cloud-native stack on OpenShift/Kubernetes for scalable LLM AI inference, integrated into production IBM watsonx platform workloads as a research-preview service — showcasing rack-scale distributed AI deployments of hundreds of NorthPole cards across many networked hosts.
  • Developed a purpose-built, bespoke LLM inference engine stack for generative AI workloads powered by NorthPole hardware, achieving bleeding-edge latency and throughput.
Research Scientist — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Jul 2021 - Sep 2022
Center for Computational Innovations
  • Led complex scientific and technical efforts at the Center for Computational Innovations, focusing on software development and benchmarks in HPC environments.
  • External collaborator on research projects for the IBM AI Hardware Center involving distributed AI training benchmarking and simulation of composable systems.
  • Provided technical expertise to enhance design, implementation, and analysis of research procedures.
  • Identified and pursued funding opportunities to support innovative research projects with the center director.
  • Triaged and prioritized center needs for research facilitation of thousands of users across multiple supercomputer systems.
Software Engineer — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Feb 2020 - Jun 2021
Center for Computational Innovations
  • Conducted research and development of software for simulating HPC interconnection networks.
  • Collaborated with external research partners to tailor software solutions to specific project requirements.
  • Generated research data supporting the Center for Computational Innovations at RPI.
Software Engineering Intern — Cisco Meraki
Summer 2017
  • Contributed to research and development of firmware for Cisco Meraki's MR platform.
  • Designed and developed a lockless, thread-safe hashtable using RCU techniques. Contributions submitted to the open-source software-defined router project Click Modular Router.
Research Assistant — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Fall 2014 - Jun 2021
Advisor: Christopher Carothers
  • Active member of the Department of Energy's Exascale Compute Project (ECP), developing and evaluating models of prototypical exascale supercomputer communication network designs through simulation.
  • Maintainer of CODES, an HPC network/storage simulation framework built on top of the ROSS parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) environment.
  • Fulfilled duties as a research assistant with the SuperNeuro research group, developing models for simulation of neuromorphic systems and associated software.
  • Primary area of research: high performance/parallel computing. Other areas of interest: distributed computing, machine learning.
Teaching Assistant, Computer Science 1 — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Fall 2014
Professor: Sibel Adali
  • Supported the professor during a course teaching fundamentals of computer science using Python.
  • Facilitated laboratory classes and discussions, hosted office hours, graded homework and exams.
Research Assistant — University of Oklahoma
May 2012 - May 2014
Advisor: Sheena Murphy
  • Continued REU research, closely inspecting electrical transport properties of antimony at cold temperatures, including first observations of weak anti-localization in quantum-confined films.
  • Developed and refined a method for measuring differential conductance of a material, improving understanding of the interface between a topological insulator and a superconductor.
National Science Foundation REU — University of Oklahoma
Summer 2012, 2013
Advisor: Sheena Murphy
  • Participated in condensed matter physics research and analysis under an NSF MRSEC grant.
  • Worked alongside graduate students in a laboratory environment.
  • Performed data collection, statistical interpretation, and analysis using Mathematica and LabVIEW.
  • Completed a metal-workshop course to qualify for use of the student shop, fabricating parts for laboratory equipment.

03 Publications

04 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

05 Other experience

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

  • 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

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.

The Oklahoma Daily, University of Oklahoma — Editor of Photography, Photographer

Aug 2009 - May 2011

  • Active member of the editorial board. Managed a staff of photographers, using time management and decision-making to meet firm deadlines.

Science Museum Oklahoma, Oklahoma City — 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.