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Linux Cluster Administrator Rice University |
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Education...
B.S. Computer Science (with Engineering Specialization) - Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas 1993.
Technical Writing Certificate - Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas 1994.
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0) - 2007.
Red Hat Enterprise Directory Services and Authentication Certificate of Expertise - 2008.
Enrolled in M.S. Systems Engineering program - University of Houston - Clear Lake, Houston, Texas (2004 - present).
About Me...
I have been employed at Rice University for 12 years. In April of 2005, I accepted the position of Linux Cluster Administrator in the Research Computing Support Group, a group within the Division of Information Technology. Our group's primary responsibility includes administration of our 246 processor HP Itanium Rice Terascale Cluster (RTC), our 632 core AMD Opteron Cray XD1 supercomputer, and our 1000 processor Intel Xeon cluster (SUG@R). My current duties involve LAMP Stack programming (Perl, PHP, MySQL) and using Dreamweaver to create web applications in support of cluster operations, documenting policies, procedures and FAQs, maintenance of the RTC, XD1, and RCSG websites, statistical analysis and presentation of system usage data, developing and maintaining a user account management system for shared computing resources on campus, account maintenance on the RTC, Cray, and SUG@R, end-user support, and other cluster tasks as needed. I also assist in ad hoc support of other clusters on campus.
Prior to my current position, I served in a number of roles in IT at Rice, including Linux Systems Administrator for 2 years, UNIX systems administrator for 6 years, and Team Leader for 5 years. The Linux Systems Administrator position involved Linux systems administration in the schools of Natural Sciences and Engineering. This included installation, administration, and support of Red Hat 9 and Red Hat Enterprise 3 on over 100 systems in 6 academic departments. This also included the installation and support of Dell PowerEdge 2800 file servers with RAID storage and LTO2 tape backup.
As the Team Leader of the Natural Sciences Computer Support Team, I served as the voice for the team, specifically with regard to problems that affected the entire team, or the entire School of Natural Sciences, and to serve as a single voice between the team and our management. I was periodically responsible for technical projects that affect all departments within Natural Sciences. I was responsible for communicating IT issues (policies, system outages, etc.) throughout the School of Natural Sciences. In addition, the Team Leader also served as the problem ticket dispatch coordinator for the team. This responsibility included receiving all problem tickets from Natural Sciences customers, and dispatching them to other team members as needed. It also included following up on many problems to ensure that an acceptable solution was found.
As the UNIX Systems Administrator in the School of Natural Sciences, I implemented the first centralized UNIX backup system in Natural Sciences using Veritas Netbackup Datacenter 3.4.1. I maintained IRIX patch sets, used by both Natural Sciences and Engineering. I also provide emergency support for UNIX systems (Solaris, IRIX, Linux) in Natural Sciences in the event of the absence of other systems administrator staff, and I maintained some Perl/CGI scripts that are used on several UNIX servers. While serving in this capacity, I was the primary systems administator in the Biochemistry and Cell Biology department where I maintained over 30 SGI workstations running IRIX 6.5, Sun workstations running Solaris 2.6 and 8, and Dell PCs running various versions of Red Hat Linux. I also maintained the Biochemistry department's servers (DNS, NIS, NFS, print, web), was responsible for system maintenance, software installations and upgrades, Apache and Samba server support, and system backups. I was also responsible for the planning and implementation of server installations and upgrades, and software and operating system installations and upgrades. There were approximately 30 SGI workstations (from Indigo up to Onyx2), several Sun workstations (Ultra 1, Ultra 10, Sun Blade 100), and several Dell Linux PCs (Optiplex and Precision) in the Biochemistry Department. In total, I was responsible for approximately 70 systems throughout Natural Sciences.