If you are seeing this then this page was served by a 39 year old PCjr running the mTCP HTTP server. Visit brutmanlabs.org to see the machine config and a link to the server stats page.

Professional Projects

I have had a pretty good career so far but like most techies I generally toil in obscurity. Here are some of the projects that I worked on that did get some external visibility.

The Blue Gene/L Supercomputer

Blue Gene/L was an IBM designed supercomputer that took first place on the TOP500 list in November 2004 and held it until June 2008 when it was displaced by the IBM Roadrunner system. BlueGene first broke into the TOP 500 list at #4 with a four rack system that we used for our early development. The first place system was a 16 rack system which eventually grew to a 64 rack system. Our customer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://asc.llnl.gov/computing_resources/bluegenel/) eventually expanded it even further.

During my time on the project (2002 to 2006) I worked on everything from low-level debugging of the compute node kernel to the mpirun program, which was what end users used to submit jobs to the machine. When I started on the project hardware was a twinkle in somebody's eye ... by the time I left it was living in a confidential building at a national laboratory and simulating the effects of aging on the nuclear stockpile. (It is better to simulate bombs blowing up than to actually try it.)

Some of the BlueGene/L team (2004?)	The 16 rack machine in Rochester, MN

Here are some Blue Gene/L publications that I contributed to:

IBM Cell Broadband Engine

The Cell BE was basically a supercomputer on a chip designed for use in the Sony PlayStation 3 but also used in IBM Blade servers. I came to the project after hardware was becoming available but before IBM had decided to try to build a full scale supercomputer from individual blades. My first major project was to lead a small team that designed and implemented an FFT library that became part of the SDK. After that work I hit the road for a while doing support for our business partners, teaching classes on how to program and optimize code for the chip, and working directly with end customers on their projects.

Showing off the QS22 at a trade show in NYC	The Cell BE chip with all 8 co-processors clearly visible

Here are some Cell related publications that I contributed to: