Ken Raffenetti is a principal software development specialist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Argonne in 2006, where he worked for seven years as a systems administrator.

In 2013, Ken shifted his main activities to software development, joining the Programming Models and Runtime Systems group, focused on the development of systems software for high-performance computing applications.

Ken’s research interests include parallel programming models and low-level communication libraries. In particular, Ken is involved in the definition of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard and is a key maintainer of MPICH, the leading implementation of MPI. He is a member of the PMIx Administrative Steering Committee, which defines the Process Management Interface used on many of today’s large-scale supercomputers. He also participates in two industry working groups for low-level communication libraries -- OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) and Unified Communications X (UCX).

Ken was a member of the Unified Communications X team that won an R&D 100 award in 2019.