I work in the Scalable System Software department at Sandia National Laboratories. This has given me the opportunity to help develop several large-scale parallel computers, including the Red Storm system that was later productized by Cray as the Cray XT line of supercomputers. Prior to joining Sandia in 2001, I studied engineering at the University of Iowa where I received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering in 1999 and an M.S. in Computer Engineering in 2001. My current research interests are in the areas of operating systems for massively parallel supercomputers, techniques for improving application resiliency to hardware faults, high-performance and scalable networking, multi-core processors, and hardware virtualization in the context of high performance computing.

Current Projects

Publications

Journal Articles

• Mahesh Rajan, Courtenay T. Vaughan, Douglas W. Doerfler, Richard F. Barrett, Paul T. Lin, Kevin T. Pedretti, K Scott Hemmert. Application-Driven Analysis of Two Generations of Capability Computing Platforms: The Transition to Multicore Processors, Journal Article, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Accepted February 2012, To Appear.
• Patrick G. Bridges, Dorian Arnold, Kevin T. Pedretti, Madhav Suresh, Feng Lu, Peter Dinda, Russ Joseph, Jack Lange. VM-based Emulation of Future Generation HPC Systems, International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, Volume 26, Number 2, May 2012.
• Kurt B. Ferreira, Patrick G. Bridges, Ron Brightwell, Kevin T. Pedretti. The Impact of System Design Parameters on Application Noise Sensitivity, Journal of Cluster Computing, 2011.
• Ron Brightwell, Trammell Hudson, Kevin T. Pedretti, Keith D. Underwood. SeaStar Interconnect: Balanced Bandwidth for Scalable Performance, IEEE Micro, Volume 26, Number 3, May/June 2006.
• Todd E. Scheetz, Nishank Trivedi, Kevin T. Pedretti, Terry A. Braun, Thomas L. Casavant. Gene Transcript Clustering: A Comparison of Parallel Approaches, Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 21, Number 5, May 2005.
• Nishank Trivedi, Jared Bischof, Steve Davis, Kevin T. Pedretti, Todd E. Scheetz, Terry A. Braun, Chad A. Roberts, Natalie L. Robinson, Val C. Sheffield, M. Bento Soares, Thomas L. Casavant. Parallel Creation of Non-redundant Gene Indices from Partial mRNA Transcripts, Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 18, Number 6, May 2002.
• Ryan C. Braun, Kevin T. Pedretti, Thomas L. Casavant. Todd E. Scheetz, Clay L. Birkett, Chad A. Roberts. Parallelization of Local BLAST Service on Workstation Clusters, Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 17, Number 6, April 2001.

Conference Papers

• James Laros, Kevin Pedretti, Suzanne Kelly, Wei Shu, Courtenay Vaughan. Energy Based Performance Tuning for Large Scale High Performance Computing Systems, 20th High Performance Computing Symposium (HPC 2012), Orlando, Florida, March 2012.
• Ming-Yu Hsieh, Jie Meng, Michael Levenhagen, Kevin Pedretti, Ayse Coskun, Arun Rodrigues. SST + gem5 = A Scalable Simulation Infrastructure for High Performance Computing (Short Paper), 5th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools), March 2012.
• Kurt Ferreira, Jon Stearley, James H. Laros III, Ron Oldfield, Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, Rolf Riesen, Patrick G. Bridges, Dorian Arnold. Evaluating the Viability of Process Replication Reliability for Exascale Systems, International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC), Seattle, Washington, November 2011.
• Ron Brightwell and Kevin T. Pedretti. An Intra-Node Implementation of OpenSHMEM Using Virtual Address Space Mapping, Fifth Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS), Galveston Island, Texas, October 2011.
• Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, Doug Doerfler, K. Scott Hemmert, James H. Laros III. The Impact of Injection Bandwidth Performance on Application Scalability, EuroMPI, Santorini, Greece, September 2011.
• Brian W. Barrett, Ron Brightwell, K. Scott Hemmert, Kevin T. Pedretti, Kyle Wheeler, Keith D. Underwood. Enhanced Support for OpenSHMEM Communication in Portals, IEEE Hot Interconnects, Santa Clara, California, August 2011.
• John Lange, Kevin T. Pedretti, Peter Dinda, Patrick Bridges, Chang Bae, Philip Soltero, Alexander Merritt. Minimal Overhead Virtualization of a Large Scale Supercomputer, ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE), Newport Beach, California, March 2011.
• Kurt B. Ferreira, Patrick G. Bridges, Ron Brightwell, Kevin T. Pedretti. The Impact of System Design Parameters on Application Noise Sensitivity, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Crete, Greece, September 2010.
• John Lange, Kevin T. Pedretti, Trammell Hudson, Peter Dinda, Zheng Cui, Lei Xia, Patrick Bridges, Andy Gocke, Steven Jaconette, Michael Levenhagen, Ron Brightwell. Palacios and Kitten: New High Performance Operating Systems For Scalable Virtualized and Native Supercomputing, IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Atlanta, Georgia, April 2010.
• James H. Laros III, Kevin T. Pedretti, Suzanne M. Kelly, John P. Vandyke, Kurt B. Ferreira, Courtenay T. Vaughan, Mark Swan. Topics on Measuring Real Power Usage on High Performance Computing Platforms, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 2009.
• Ron Brightwell, Trammell Hudson, Kevin T. Pedretti. SMARTMAP: Operating System Support for Efficient Data Sharing Among Processes on a Multi-Core Processor, International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'08), Austin, Texas, November 2008.
• Ron Brightwell, Trammell Hudson, Kevin T. Pedretti, Rolf Riesen, Keith Underwood. Implementation and Performance of Portals 3.3 on the Cray XT3, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Boston, Massachusetts, September 2005.
• Ron Brightwell, Kevin T. Pedretti, Keith Underwood. Initial Performance Evaluation of the Cray SeaStar Interconnect, 13th IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects, Stanford, California, August 2005.
• Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell. A NIC-Offload Implementation of Portals for Quadrics QsNet, Fifth LCI International Conference on Linux Clusters, Austin, Texas, May 2004.
• Nishank Trivedi, Kevin T. Pedretti, Terry A. Braun, Todd E. Scheetz, Thomas L. Casavant. Alternative Parallelization Strategies in EST Clustering, Seventh International Conference on Parallel Computing Technologies (PaCT), September 2003.
• Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, Josh Williams. Cplant Runtime System Support for Multi-Processor and Heterogeneous Compute Nodes, IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing, Chicago, Illinois, September 2002.
• Kevin T. Pedretti, Todd E. Scheetz, Terry A. Braun, Chad A. Roberts, Natalie L. Robinson, Thomas L. Casavant. A Parallel Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) Clustering Program, Sixth International Conference on Parallel Computing Technologies (PaCT), September 2001.
• Samuel A. Fineberg and Kevin T. Pedretti. Analysis of 100Mb/s Ethernet for the Whitney Commodity Computing Testbed, Eighth Symposium on the Frontiers of Massively Parallel Computation, Annapolis, Maryland, February, 1999.

Workshop Papers

• Kurt B. Ferreira, Kevin T. Pedretti, Ron Brightwell, Patrick G. Bridges, David Fiala, Frank Mueller. Evaluating Operating System Vulnerability to Memory Errors, Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS), held in conjunction with the 26th ACM/SIGARCH International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), Venice, Italy, June 2012.
• Jon Stearley, Kurt Ferreira, David Robinson, Dorian Arnold, Patrick Bridges, Jim Laros, Kevin Pedretti, Rolf Riesen. Does Partial Replication Pay Off?, Workshop on Fault Tolerance for HPC at eXtreme Scale (FTXS), Boston, Massachusetts, June 2012.
• Patrick G. Bridges, Dorian Arnold, Kevin T. Pedretti. VM-based Slack Emulation of Large-scale Systems, Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for Supercomputers (ROSS), held in conjunction with the 25th ACM/SIGARCH International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS), Tucson, Arizona, May 2011.
• Courtenay Vaughan, Mahesh Rajan, Richard Barrett, Doug Doerfler, and Kevin T. Pedretti. Investigating the Impact of the Cielo Cray XE6 Architecture on Scientific Application Codes, Workshop on Large-Scale Parallel Processing (LSPP), held in conjunction with the 25th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), Anchorage, Alaska, May 2011.
• Kevin T. Pedretti and Patrick G. Bridges. Opportunities for Leveraging OS Virtualization in High-End Supercomputing, Workshop on Micro Architectural Support for Virtualization, Data Center Computing, and Clouds (MASVDC'10), held in conjunction with The 43rd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-43), Atlanta, Georgia, December 2010.
• Ron Brightwell and Kevin T. Pedretti. Optimizing Multi-Core MPI Collectives with SMARTMAP, The Third International Workshop on Advanced Distributed and Parallel Network Applications (ADPNA 2009), held in conjunction with The 37th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2009), Vienna, Austria, September 2009.
• Ron Brightwell, Kevin T. Pedretti, Kurt Ferreira. Instrumentation and Analysis of MPI Queue Times on the SeaStar High-Performance Network, Workshop on Advanced Networking and Communications, 17th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, August 2008.

Posters

• Alexander M. Merritt, Kevin T. Pedretti, and Karsten Schwan. Techniques for Managing Data Distribution in NUMA Systems, International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'10), New Orleans, Louisiana, November 2010.
• Kevin T. Pedretti. Characterization of Intra-node Topology and Locality, International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'07), Reno, Nevada, November 2007.

Technical Reports

• Kevin T. Pedretti, Suzanne M. Kelly, Michael J. Levenhagen. Summary of Multi-Core Hardware and Programming Model Investigations, Sandia Technical Report, SAND2008-3205, May 2008.
• Rolf Riesen, Ron Brightwell, Kevin T. Pedretti, Arthur B. Maccabe, Trammell Hudson. The Portals 3.3 Message Passing Interface - Revision 2.1, Sandia Technical Report, SAND20006-0420, April 2006.
• Kevin T. Pedretti and Samuel A. Fineberg. Analysis of 2D Torus and Hub Topologies of 100 Mb/s Ethernet for the Whitney Commodity Computing Testbed, NAS Technical Report, NAS-97-017, September 1997.

Other Papers

• Kevin T. Pedretti, Courtenay Vaughan, Karl Scott Hemmert, Brian Barrett. Application Sensitivity to Link and Injection Bandwidth on a Cray XT4 System, Proceedings of the 2008 Cray Users' Group Annual Technical Conference, Helsinki, Finland, May 2008.
• Kurt Ferreira, Kevin T. Pedretti, Michael Levenhagen, Ron Brightwell. Exploring Memory Management Strategies in Catamount, Proceedings of the 2008 Cray Users' Group Annual Technical Conference, Helsinki, Finland, May 2008.
• Ron Brightwell, Trammell Hudson, Kevin T. Pedretti, Keith Underwood. An Accelerated Implementation of Portals on the Cray SeaStar, Proceedings of the 2006 Cray Users' Group Annual Technical Conference, Lugano, Switzerland, May 2006.
• Kevin T. Pedretti and Trammell Hudson. Developing Custom Firmware for the Red Storm SeaStar Network Interface, Proceedings of the 2005 Cray Users' Group Annual Technical Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 2005.
• Ron Brightwell, Trammell Hudson, Kevin T. Pedretti, Rolf Riesen, Keith Underwood. Portals 3.3 on the Sandia/Cray Red Storm System, Proceedings of the 2005 Cray Users' Group Annual Technical Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 2005.
• James A. Ang, Robert A. Ballance, Lee Ann Fisk, Jeanette R. Johnston, Kevin T. Pedretti. Red Storm Capability Computing Queuing Policy, Proceedings of the 2005 Cray Users' Group Annual Technical Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, May 2005.
• Kevin T. Pedretti. Accurate Parallel Clustering of EST (Gene) Sequences, Master's Thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, May 2001.

Invited Talks

• Kevin T. Pedretti. Kitten: A Lightweight Operating System for Ultrascale Supercomputers, New Mexico Consortium Ultrascale Systems Research Center, August 2011.
• Kevin T. Pedretti. The Kitten Lightweight Kernel, FastOS Phase II Workshop held in conjunction with ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS09), June 2009.
• Kevin T. Pedretti. Lightweight Operating Systems for Scalable Native and Virtualized Supercomputing, ORNL Future Technologies Colloquium Series, April 2009.
• Kevin T. Pedretti. Quad-core Catamount and R&D in Multi-core Lightweight Kernels, Salishan Conference on High-Speed Computing, April 2008.

Patents

• Kevin T. Pedretti. Distributed Processor Allocation for Launching Applications in a Massively Connected Processors Complex, Patent #7,454,595, Granted November 2008.

Awards and Honors

• 2011 - Defense Programs Award for Excellence - Sandia Red Storm Supercomputer Operating System Team, Team Member
• 2010 - NNSA Environmental Stewardship Award - Red Storm Energy Savings, Team Member
• 2010 - FLC Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer - Red Storm Massively Parallel Processor Supercomputer Architecture, Team Member
• 2010 - Sandia Employee Recognition Award - Kitten Operating System Virtualization Team, Team Representative
• 2009 - R&D100 Award - Catamount N-Way Lightweight Kernel
• 2006 - R&D100 Award - Compute Process Allocator (Fact Sheet)
• 2006 - Lockheed Martin NOVA Award - Red Storm Supercomputer Design and Development Team
• 2005 - Sandia Award for Excellence - For developing a C-based firmware for the Red Storm network interface
• 2003 - Sandia Award for Excellence - For technical excellence in the design and development of the Red Storm node allocator