Contact Info

Work Bio

Craig Ulmer is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff in the Scalable Modeling and Analysis group at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. Craig has over 20 years of experience applying custom hardware accelerators to solve storage-intensive problems in a variety of mission spaces.

Prior to joining Sandia, Craig received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology for his work with low-level communication libraries for cluster computers. This research resulted in a flexible message layer for Myrinet named GRIM that enables users to efficiently utilize hardware accelerators and multimedia devices that are distributed throughout a cluster. While attending Georgia Tech, Craig completed intern and Co-Op work assignments at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Eastman Kodak's Digital Technology Center, and IBM's EduQuest division.

Analyzing Airplane Tracks

A personal hobby of mine is to collect and analyze airplane position datasets gathered from public sources. I initially ran an Amazon scraping campaign to gather data from a popular airplane website, but have since switched to using data from community sites. I collect data for the Bay Area using my own RTL/SDR ADSB receiver and have written tools to convert the point data to tracks and analyze it. Having long term data has allowed me to pull out interesting events, such as surveillance missions and wartime struggles.

Previous Work

• Offloading Data Management Services to SmartNICs: See our final report.
• Faodel: An RDMA-based Key/Blob Service for Distributed Memory: See our release page.
• FPGA-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems: See our NIDS papers.
• Communication Software for Resource-Rich Clusters: My Ph.D. work with Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili involved the design and implementation of a low-level communication library named GRIM (General-purpose Reliable In-order Messages). GRIM was unique because it provided a robust way of exchanging data between processors, memory, and peripheral cards distributed throughout a cluster. Custom firmware was developed for the Myrinet Network Interface (NI) that allowed it to serve as a communication broker for the various resources in a host system. GRIM featured a rich set of communication primitives (remote DMA, active message, and NI-based multicast), but still managed to deliver low-latency, high-bandwidth performance.
• Wireless Sensor Networks: During my first summer internship at JPL, my mentor asked me to work through the logistics of deploying a large number of low-power, wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes on Mars. After interviewing a number of domain experts at JPL, I defined a basic set of requirements for a deployment and worked through the logistics for different deployment strategies (atmosphere scatter, tumbleweeds, hoppers). I then constructed WSN simulators to help explore different strategies for creating a routable network from the nodes. This work demonstrated that a campaign-style election system could partition the network in a distributed manner.