Cordell Bloor

My name is Cordell Bloor, though informally I go by Cory. I'm a software engineer and have been working professionally building software on various Linux systems since 2009. My day job is at AMD, where I work on the ROCm GPU compute stack. I am an upstream developer for the rocsolver, hipsolver, rocm-cmake and hipfort projects. Historically, my work with Debian was not part of my job, but that is changing in March 2025. The mandate from my employer is to help support Debian in integrating support for AMD GPU hardware. I'm excited to begin working on this full-time, because that's a goal that benefits everyone.

My interests are mostly in computer graphics and high-performance computing. The thing that drew me to Linux was that nearly all the tools I needed could be trivially installed from the OS package manager, but it always frustrated me that anything involving GPU computing involved complex platform-specific interfaces and proprietary SDKs. I always wished that GPU programming worked just as well as traditional CPU programming.

I was invited to work with the Debian AI group after a discussion with Christian Kastner back in 2021. Since then, I have been collaborating with various folks in Debian to improve the support for AMD GPU hardware. I help debug problems with AMD-related packages on Debian, triage bugs filed by Debian developers against upstream AMD projects, and help to reconcile any necessary differences between Debian and upstream packages. My early contributions to Debian were largely providing build instructions for the ROCm stack. Later, I provided patches to help adapt rocm-hipamd for Debian packaging and worked to get bug fixes into LLVM to support HIP in system directories. More recently, I've been packaging the ROCm math and communication libraries for Debian, building on the work done by Maxime Chambonnet and Étienne Mollier, as well as building a continuous integration system for AMD GPU software in partnership with Christian Kastner. I am now working towards enabling AMD GPU support for PyTorch.

I would like to become a Debian Developer to help maintain the AMD ROCm library packages. I've been working with Étienne, Christian and Mo for several years now and believe I am well-equipped to contribute independently.