June 2013

You just recently left ICL. Tell us where you are and what you’re doing now.

I’m now working in the Systems and Operations group at the National Institute for Computational Science. There are about 12 of us total who are all working and specializing in different areas. There are people dedicated to infrastructure (puppet, ldap, etc.), large parallel file systems, security, networking, etc. I’ve been assigned to work on Beacon which is the #1 machine on the Green 500. My first assignment was to get the latest Intel Xeon Phi drivers deployed in a stateless NFSRoot environment. This makes it easier to deploy nodes quickly in a cluster. They have the original Beacon cluster, which is only 16 nodes, that I’ve been testing on until it is solid.  At that point we will deploy it to the production Beacon cluster.

In what ways did working at ICL prepare you for what you do now, if at all?

One of the reasons they put me on Beacon is because of my experience working on the Intel Xeon Phis at ICL. More than that though, ICL has taught me the fundamentals of HPC. When I first started with ICL I did mostly general IT work. I would not have been nearly as prepared to do HPC work if it wasn’t for the research that ICL does. Most organizations would not have resources such as NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs, and Intel Xeon Phis to work with and learn with. It was great to work in such a diverse and interesting research group.

You’re one of the earlier ICLers. Tell us about your background and how you got started with the group.

Before working at ICL I was an intern at Philips/Magnavox working on WebTV. They closed their office in West Knoxville, so I was looking for another job. My then fiancée went to high school with Brett Ellis who was the junior admin at the time. The senior admin Judi Talley was about to retire and Brett was taking over the senior position so they were looking for a replacement. I stopped by one day to meet Brett and it just happened to be the day that everyone was giving their summer talks in Ayres Hall. I came by later to meet with Brett and was hired on as a student through the summer and then took over in the junior admin position when Brett took over the senior position in the fall of 1999. In 2005 Brett left to take a position at Myricom and I took over for him as the senior admin.

Enjoying such a long tenure with the group, any interesting stories you would like to share about your time here?

One of my favorite stories from ICL is a prank that was pulled. It doesn’t involve me, but it is still a story I tell every once in a while because it is a classic. Back in Ayres Hall everyone shared an office as there weren’t any single suites there. In one of them was Kevin London, Scott Wells, Nathan Garner, and Paul McMahan. Just about every time Scott Wells would leave the office on a vacation they would play a prank on him. Usually it was pretty simple stuff like seal up his cubicle walls so he couldn’t get in to his cubicle or hook his monitor up to someone else’s computer. One time though Paul McMahan decided to do something a little more subtle. He routed all of Scott’s web traffic through his machine and then replaced certain phrases that would appear on web pages. Scott would always read up on the UT Volunteer’s athletics programs so to get Scott mad he would replace phrases such as “Philip Fulmer” with “Philip Fatty Fulmer” or “Tennessee Vols” with “Overrated Tennessee Vols”.  It took a while for Scott to catch on and he was even mad enough that he was either writing emails to the editors and writers of these articles or at least threatened to do so. He eventually figured it out because he spotted some things like “Lady Overrated Vols”.

You haven’t been gone from ICL long enough to really miss it much, so what do you think you’re going to miss the most?

I have definitely missed the people so far. There are people I’ve been working with for years now that I miss seeing and talking to.

What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?

Hopefully still working in HPC Systems Administration somewhere if not at NICS or ORNL. My wife and I dream to live near London, England at some point so maybe after 10 years we’d look to try and move there. I don’t believe there is much in the way of HPC in London now, but maybe that will change in 10 years.

Tell us something about yourself that might surprise some people.

I have no idea what you people are talking about in your Friday lunch talks.  Well, that may not be a surprise, but it sure is true! Oh, and people that I recruit to go play soccer with me inevitably get hurt…bad.