Leadership Team
OFA Chair: Doug Ledford
Doug Ledford is a Principal Software Engineer at HPE. He studied Computer Sciences at Southwest Missouri State University, where he was introduced to Linux back when it only ran from floppy discs. Doug led the team that built one of Springfield Missouri's first Internet Service Providers, utilizing Linux for all of the servers. He became the defacto maintainer of the aic7xxx SCSI driver, and then a member of the Linux Maintenance Project. Doug has worked in a number of different areas in the Linux kernel, including SCSI drivers, SCSI mid layer, audio drivers, network drivers, MD software RAID, and the RDMA stack in the Linux kernel as well as the user space portion of the RDMA stack. Doug is currently an upstream maintainer of the Linux kernel's RDMA stack and of the rdma-core user space project as well as a Red Hat Subject Matter Expert for the MD software RAID stack and the RDMA stack.
Phil Cayton, OFA Vice Chair, OFA MWG Co-chair
Phil Cayton is a Principal Engineer for Intel with nearly 30 years of industry experience researching and developing networking, storage, and datacenter infrastructure technologies. In addition to his current role with Open Fabrics Alliance, he is actively involved with the SNIA’s Storage Management Initiative, the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, and the NVM ExpressTM Consortium as chair of the NVMe Boot Task Group as well as setting the agenda for the main NVMe Technical Work Group. He has been involved with InfiniBandTM since the beginning and has written many RDMA-based drivers including the initial prototype NVMe-over-Fabrics driver stack. Additionally, he has led remote peer-to-peer memory projects, Open Fabrics testing and patching, dynamic data center energy efficiency R&D, server autonomics R&D, mobile-device multi-radio interference mitigation, mobile augmented reality, sensor enhanced personal medical monitoring, and network driver development projects. He has several published whitepapers and 21 granted patents. In his spare time he is an avid sailor.
Treasurer : John Byrne
John Byrne is a Research Engineer at HPE in Hewlett Packard Labs. He began writing device drivers on PDP-11s for image processing systems, in a time when 1 MiB of DRAM for a frame buffer was considered impressive. This focus on low-level software continued has continued since then: writing drivers and firmware for new hardware; learning the Linux process, VM, and VFS subsystems to implement Single System Image clustering; and, for the past few years, the focus has been on the HPC networking and developing a libfabric provider and driver for prototype hardware brought him into the OFA’s orbit.
OFA Secretary: Michael Aguilar
Michael Aguilar is a Senior Computer Scientist for HPC Research and Development at Sandia National Laboratories, working with both Capacity Computing and Advanced Architecture Testbeds. Michael is responsible for management of Sandia's ARM64 HPC systems, including Astra, and is active with the OpenFabrics Alliance, as the Board Secretary. He is currently serving as Co-Chair of the OFA Sunfish Working Group and is a member of the Lustre Working Group. In addition, Michael is involved in Sandia Labs BeeGFS burst buffer research and development. Michael has a Masters of Science degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering.
OFA Sunfish Working Group Co-Chair, Russ Herrell
Russ Herrell was born, raised, and educated in the mountains of Montana. Even before he received his MSEE from Montana State in 1982, he was working with Hewlett Packard computing designs. He started full time work for HP in Fort Collins after graduation and has been with the ‘Bill and Dave’ company ever since. He has designed error correcting memory boards, multi-processor 3D graphics transform engines, high performance 3D graphics processors, and several generations of large SMP business servers. He holds many patents, but his favorite ones are associated with top to bottom system architectures. Russ was most recently a Distinguished Technologist in Hewlett Packard Labs contributing to the CXL interconnect standard and working with the Open Fabric Alliance and DMTF organizations on Sunfish, an open standard for management of disaggregated fabric resources. He retired from Hewlett Packard Enterprise in February, 2025.
