Profile

Delivering outstanding, novel solutions to the most complex and challenging distributed computing problems out there — all while balancing availability, scalability, flexibility, and feature velocity. With strong research, design, and development skills, and deep experience high-performance computing (HPC) as well as enterprise design patterns, I bring unique, supportable, and extremely powerful solutions to the toughest environments in the world.

 

Technology and Architectural Skills

IT Business

Transactional & Analytical Systems

High Performance Computing

Distributed Computing
Product market-fit and channel development, especially for new/novel technology Cross-platform orchestration and custom integrations (kubernetes, mesos, docker, etc) Hyperscale <> HPC paradigm connectivity, especially with container orchestration and traditional HPC job scheduling Blockchain evaluation, design, and deployment for both permissioned/decentralized chains.

Capacity and performance modeling and forecasting

Very large scale high-throughput, HA OLTP systems (horizontal, vertical scaling)

Global addressable, large shared memory systems implementation & design

Advanced provisioning and automated deployment systems design (Cloud Computing)

IT monitoring, deployment, and content management

Complex event streaming w/ augmentation, scoring, metrics, machine learning

Parallel filesystems design and implementation (LUSTRE, GPFS, Panasys, pNFS)

large-scale horizontal Fault- toleration, drift correction, anamoly detection

Very large-scale, geo-distributed command and control

Adaptive, real-time data warehouse systems design and implementation

hyperscale topology (torus, hypercube, fat-tree, hybrid). NUMAlink, Infiniband, Ethernet w/ RDMA

Massively parallel distributed systems design

Very high-throughput, HA messaging and data marshaling

Graph, NewSQL, NoSQL, Hadoop distributed and clustered analytics systems

Processor offload technologies (GPU, DSP, Co-Processor)

Multi-vendor, multi-platform large scale design and implementation

 

Infrastructure Design & Implementation Skills

  • Operating Systems Integration, Internals, and Performance Tuning
  • Messaging Middleware
  • Blockchain / Distributed Ledger (chain agnostic)
  • Storage Systems Integration
  • Network Systems including fabrics, virtual networks, traditional and high-performance, security
  • Software Architecture in a variety of platforms and methodologies
  • Database systems including OLTP, OLAP, NewSQL, NoSQL, Graph
  • Research and Development, most recently in event ontology, graph relationships, processor offload, and RDMA

Experience

Principal and Co-Founder, Providentia Worldwide, LLC; Fredericksburg, VA / San Francisco, CA -- 2017-Present

Co-founder of the technology consulting firm, Providentia Worldwide, which is dedicated to solutions in the "gray area" between emergenct blockchain, enterprise hyperscale, and traditional high performance computing/supercomputing areas. By combining techniques from a variety of industries, academic, and government, we bring world-class best practices to bear on some of the most difficult problems on planet earth.

Customers Include:

  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Oak Ridge, TN. Department of Leadership Computing.
  • Qualcomm; San Diego, CA.
  • Ampere Computing; Santa Clara, CA.
  • Samsung; Teaneck, NJ/Austin, TX; Data Services America.
  • L3 Harris; Melbourne, FL.
  • Kudelski Security; Scottsdale, AZ
  • Data Vortex Technologies; Austin, TX

Principal Architect, Advanced Technology Group, PayPal; San Jose, CA — 2011-2017

PayPal created the Advanced Technology Group to champion new technologies within the company. Provide roadmaps, reference designs and implementations, and integration strategies for new hardware and software systems. Employ techniques from other markets and industries to bring to bear on PayPal’s problems to deliver competitive advantage and to enable leap-frog advancements in operations, development, and architectures. Work to enhance PayPal’s technical recruiting domestically through building a strong, innovative reputation and delivering quality research and development and by fostering partnerships with government, industry, and academia. 

Key Initiatives include:

  • Systems Intelligence. Bringing machine learning and complex event processing to systems management and command and control.
  • International Staging. Deliver development autonomy through contained systems and global deployments. Initially delivered in Singapore and Chennai, India.
  • Machine Learning in in-transit and in-situ analytics
  • Hardware evaluation and integration, including processor offload and large-footprint shared-memory systems.
  • Graph relationships and technologies in streaming systems with very large scale transactional update rates
  • Sponsoring HPC in Big Data forum and community with meetings and social media. Initial kickoff at Supercomputing 2013; Denver, CO.

Key partnerships include:

  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Oak Ridge, TN
  • Silicon Graphics International; Milpitas, CA
  • Texas Instruments; Gaithersburg, MD
  • HP; Houston, TX
  • IBM Research; Austin, TX

 

President, SGI Worldwide Users Group; Salt Lake City, UT — 2013-Present

Elected position for SGI (Silicon Graphics International) Users Group. Responsibilities include working with sponsors, logistics, keynotes, and presentations for annual meetings. Liaison with SGI management for direction and customer assistance and user group advocacy. Work to enhance customer advocacy within SGI and for HPC systems and technologies across academic, scientific, and industry markets and in social media. 

 

Consultant and Sole Proprietor, Phaedo Consulting; Fredericksburg, VA — 2007-Present

Management and engineering consulting for systems integration and parallel systems design. Specializing in bringing internet and enterprise expertise to industries and markets where innovation is not as prevalent. Focus primarily on healthcare. Customers include Valley Health Systems; Winchester, VA and Mark Hebertson, DDS; Fredericksburg, VA.

 

Distinguished Systems Architect, eBay; San Jose, CA — 2006-2011

Role in Corporate Architecture (governance and design for major properties including but not limited to Skype, PayPal, eBay, Shopping.Com, Half.Com, etc). Deliver a Service Oriented Architecture managing disparate platforms and ease integration amongst acquisition properties; Design and implement very large scale complex event processing system for fraud analytics. Design, engineering, and deployment responsibilities for business and operations projects ranging from distributed application monitoring and event correlation to next-generation mail systems deployment utilizing geo-distributed datacenter design. Key accomplishments:

  • Geo-disperse deployment (13 datacenters on 3 continents and 6 countries) with lights-out management, 99.999% Availability, active/active application management
  • Real-time (<1s) data warehousing and analytics implementation for very large scale (96+ physical instances) OLTP database
  • Automated application provisioning, installation, monitoring, and self-healing. (Cloud Computing)
  • Develop HPC expertise and solutions for eBay, inc and productionalize for messaging and event systems. Brought shared-memory, infiniband, numalink and associated fabrics, storage, and systems to full production.
  • Grid-enabled real-time cross-platform/application performance modeling and trending
  • Method for analyzing and predicting database memory fragmentation and associating live site events to problematic sql
  • Network design promoting ease-of-interchange between security zones while maintaining flexibility and centralized routing for ease of administration.

 

Technical Duty Officer, eBay/PayPal; San Jose, CA — 2004-2006

Responsible for crisis management and critical restoration of site technical problems for eBay.Com, Half.Com, and PayPal.Com. Directs technical solution of all class 1 and 2 issues. Responsible for resource allocation during problem events, coordinating the restoration and critical repair of those issues, and providing the technical interface into senior management for explanation and proposed technical solutions. Responsible for delivering and executing technical problem solutions and all required maintenance activities for the production sites and datacenters.

 

Distinguished Architect; eBay/PayPal; San Jose, CA — 2001-2004

  • eBay Financing Center and eBay Capital. Design and implement a new support model for alternate business solutions and directions for eBay and its transaction platform. Demonstrate advanced technologies (including Messaging Middleware, new CGI languages, streamlined database and data- mining), lower cost and Time-to-Market for new applications, and maintain extremely highly scalable and supportable systems. 
  • PayPal and eBay duties include project scoping, design, process engineering, 3rd Level Support, Application Engineering and Implementation, 3rd Party Vetting and Support, SLA negotiation, Advanced Technology Investigations. 
    • PayPal: Design and implement next generation payments solution and migration plan for Paypal Financial Systems. Develop and deploy a migration strategy for the Paypal batch infrastructure to the Appworx Scheduling Tool. Assist in front-line on-call support for Paypal Financial Systems and business operations including ACH, Debit Card, Credit Card, Checks, Wire Transfer, Money Order, and Billpay Processing.
    • eBay: Major projects and designs include advanced application messaging middleware design and integration; data mining and historical user research; V3 Platform selection; “Network Flight Recorder”.

 

Principal Engineer, eBay; San Jose, CA — 2000-2001

Duties included Systems Administration; Scope investigation and business unit consulting; 3rd party support, Advanced technology investigations.

Major projects and initiatives include High-Volume reliable email delivery mechanism; Oracle load-balancing; batch/OLTP separation within the eBay platform; eBay V3 Architecture design and presentation (Dynamic Data Routing, Messaging, Monitoring); Internal Application Logging deployment; SNMP/Appliance capacity and performance modeling; Database Cluster design and deployments. eBay hired me for this position in spring of 2000.  I had been onsite since the summer of 1999 as a consultant.

 

CTO/Systems Engineer, Phaedo Consulting; Vienna, VA 1998-2000

Extensive systems and security administration; Architectural and implementation design; Emergency Response and Disaster Recovery planning; Risk Analytics. Premier accounts Included:

 

UNIX Systems Administrator, Value Behavioral Health; Falls Church, VA 1996-1998

Systems Integration, Application Integration, Backup/Recovery, Network Security, Remote Access, Domain Name Service, Internet/IntraNet Applications Support, EC/EDI Support 

 

UNIX Systems Administrator, Virtual Electronic Commerce Corp; Fredericksburg, VA 1996

Systems Integration, Application Integration, Backup/Recovery, Network Security, Remote Access, Domain Name Service, Internet/IntraNet Applications Support, EC/EDI Support, UNIX Platform development 

 

UNIX Systems/Database Administrator, Yale University; New Haven, CT 1995

Network Configuration, Applications Development, Database Administration, Applications and Systems Support, Remote Access Solutions, Systems Integration, Printing Support 

 

Webmaster/Application Developer, Vanderbilt University Academic Computing & Information Systems; Nashville, TN 1994-1995

Internet development, Application integration, Systems recovery 

Education

Yale Divinity School

New Haven, CT

Masters of Arts in Religon (incomplete)

American Historical Ethics

1996

Vanderbilt University

Nashville, TN

Bachelor of Arts, Cum Laude

English Literature and Philosophy

1995

Patents

8712868: Listing Recommendation Using Generation of a User-specific Query in a Network-based Commerce System

7991845: Delivering Certified Messages to Message Servers

7831476: Listing Recommendation in a Network-based Commerce System

7334019: Delivering Messages to Message Servers

20160080173: Complex Event Processing as Digital Signals [PENDING]

Awards

Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Award. Finalist. 2010; San Francisco, CA

HPC User Forum Innovation Excellence Award. Financial Industry Award Winner. 2012; Salt Lake City, UT

HPCWire Reader’s Choice Award. Financial Industry Winner. 2013; Denver, CO

HPCWire Reader's Choice Award. Best Application of Big Data in HPC. 2014; New Orleans, LA.

Selected Keynotes

“Between HPC and Enterprise: New Paradigms for Systems Architecture and Design”; Supercomputing, 2013; Denver, CO

“How We Learn: Making Sense of the Internet of Things”; Skysong Connect, 2014; Scottsdale, AZ

“Comprehending Things: Ontology and Semantics for Event Handling IoT”, Wolfram Data Summit, 2014; Washington, DC

"HPC in Machine/Deep Learning", HPC User Forum, 9/2016, Beijing, China.

"HPC in Machine/Deep Learning: Practical Deployments and Best Practices 2017-2019", National Geo-Spatial Data Summit, Washington DC