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)

Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Senior Systems Administrator (2000 - 2007)

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

Other Professional Activities

Technical Reports and Presentations

Linux Clustering

Newsgroup FAQs