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 stack. More specifically, I'm an upstream developer for the rocsolver, hipsolver, rocm-cmake and hipfort projects. However, my work on Debian is not part of my job. I'm just a volunteer like anyone else.

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. Most recently, I've been packaging the ROCm math and communication libraries for Debian, building on the work done by Maxime Chambonnet and Étienne Mollier. My most recent packages have been rocsparse and hipsparse, though I've also made significant contributions to rocprim and rocrand. I also have a number of packages awaiting sponsorship, including rocthrust and hipcub. Some of my packages nearing completion include rocfft and rccl. My future plans include packages for rocblas, hipblas, hipfft, rocalution, rocsolver, hipsolver, and miopen as I work towards enabling GPU support for PyTorch and Tensorflow.

I would like to become a Debian Maintainer to help maintain the ROCm math and communication libraries. I've been working with Étienne for over a year and believe that I now understand how to handle routine package maintenance.