Tim Skirvin
Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory
2575 Sand Hill Road, M/S 97
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Email: tskirvin@slac.stanford.edu
Phone: 650/723-7953
Office: Building 50, Room 323
Professional Experience
Office of the CIO, Operations Directorate, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory - Unix HPC System Administration Specialist / Software Developer (2011 - present)
Information Technology Services, Stanford University - Senior Systems Administrator (2007 - present)
- Develop and support the first campus centrally-managed high-performance/research computing (HPC) environment, including ongoing (2-3 year) strategic plans for supporting both department-level clusters and a central compute facility for all campus users.
- HPC support at both the research group and department level, and as a central campus service.
- Develop initial Cloud Computing standards and practices within ITS.
- Manage and support timeshare clusters for central campus research computing.
- With team, support 300+ Linux servers for a variety of campus clients.
- Develop software for group integration, including "out-of-date" package management tool for cross-platform patch management; a command-line tool to work with the Remedy ticketing system; and a central CMDB registration engine.
Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Senior Systems Administrator (2000 - 2007)
- Administer, maintain, and secure a network of 100 users and 300 machines, running Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, IRIX, Tru64, AIX, WinNT/2000/XP, and MacOS 9/X.
- Design, manage and upgrade group facilities including a 3D projection system and multiple Linux-based compute clusters.
- Lead a team of six to nine graduate aides and one to three undergraduate assistants in troubleshooting and solving user problems.
- Budget and plan for continuing system and network upgrades.
- Assist with and write grant proposals for research and equipment.
- Write and maintain system software tools, ranging from internal backup solutions to web management tools.
- Write and maintain system and user databases and associated frameworks.
- Develop and teach a series of workshops on designing and building Linux clusters.
- Manage web site design and content; maintain public technical documentation
Education
Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 1999.
Professional Skills
Extensive background with high-performance/research compute cluster design and support, including ground-up cluster design.
Significant higher-education experience, including grant-writing and managing relationships between central IT and smaller units.
Specific knowledge of queueing systems (especially SGE/GridEngine) and ROCKS and Scyld Linux clustering solutions. Knowledgeable of national supercomputer centers.
Experienced with virtually all aspects of running a computational facility, including funding and budgeting; machine room management; day-to-day system patching and upgrades; client and customer support, from help desk to level 2-3 support; vendor relations; project and team management; storage and backups; funding agency politics, including grant writing; hiring; computational facility design; software design.
Strong background with writing maintainable and expandable open-source software projects, with special interest in developer support applications
Intimate knowledge of Usenet News administration, design, and development.
Experienced with SQL database use, design and administration.
Management: experience with developing computational facility budgets. Have managed up to ten part-time workers. Have been involved in hiring consultants and part-time and full-time workers.
Specific Tools
- Programming Languages: perl, bash, ruby, python
- Operating Systems: Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL), Solaris, Mac OS X, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64
- Sysadmin tools: Puppet, remctl
- Version control: git, svn, cvs
- Modern File systems: GPFS, ZFS
- Documentation: markdown/ikiwiki, LaTeX, POD, HTML
Other Professional Activities
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) - Member 2008 - present
- USENIX (Unix Administration Society) - Member 2000 - present
- SAGE (System Administrators Guild) - Member 2000 - present
- LOPSA (League of Professional System Administrators) - Member 2005 - present
- Big-8 Management Board - Co-Founder and Board Member 2005 - present
- Newsgroup Moderator (discussion facilitation and software design and maintenance)
- comp.std.announce 2006 - present
- humanities.philosophy.objectivism 1995 - present
- news.admin.net-abuse.policy 1996 - 2009
- news.admin.net-abuse.sightings 1996 - 2009
- news.admin.announce 2005 - 2009
- news.announce.newgroups 2006 - 2009
- rec.arts.comics.reviews 2005 - present
- Technical Moderator (software and interface design and maintenance,
technical advice for other moderators)
- news.admin.moderation 2007 - present
- news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins 1998 - 2009
- rec.games.frp.moderated 2000 - 2007
- rec.games.mecha 1997 - 2009
- rec.toys.transformers.moderated 1999 - 2009
- soc.culture.paganism 2006 - 2009
Technical Reports and Presentations
Linux Clustering
- Cluster Workshop Series 2005-2006
- TCB Summer School 2003: lecture, tutorial, video,
- NAMD Linux Cluster Tutorial 2001
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