All are welcome to a Networked Systems Tech Talk on Tuesday, March 31, 2026, at 10–11:15 a.m. by Kevin A. Brown of Argonne National Laboratory. The talk, titled “Understanding and Predicting Network Performance: It’s Hard,” will be held in room 104 of the Stuart Building.

Abstract

“The network is the computer” is a phrase that was coined nearly four decades ago and remains as relevant as ever in this era of exascale computing. At the heart of a high-performance computer (HPC) system, or supercomputer, is advanced networking technologies that allow efficient coordination of distributed processing at extreme scales. However, due to the complexities of the network infrastructure and the scientific workloads that use them, ensuring good network performance is hard.

Our work aims to provide a better understanding of network behaviors and bottlenecks to improve the performance of current supercomputers as well as the designs of future systems. The two core areas of this effort are (i) network performance measurement and analysis, and (ii) network modeling and simulations. This talk will provide an overview of our efforts in these areas, highlighting opportunities for collaboration on topics such as automating application performance analysis, coupling discrete event simulations with machine learning models, and analyzing large system performance datasets.

Bio

Kevin A. Brown is the Assistant Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematical and Computing Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His prior work experience includes serving as a Unix Systems Administrator at Digicel (Jamaica) Ltd. and as a postdoctoral appointee in the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility focused on exascale interconnect performance evaluation. Brown’s main area of research focuses on performance measurement, analysis, and simulation of HPC infrastructure. He leads and co-leads several multi-institutional projects aimed at designing more efficient communication infrastructure for HPC systems and distributed environments as well as improving tools for the modeling and simulation of emerging infrastructure.