| 1. What's your role within grid computing? |
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Establishing an architecture for grid-based structural biology computing,
and a web-portal interface for job submission and management. |
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| 2. Why did you get in to grid? |
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UK e-Science funding of PhD studentships at just the right time. I was looking for a
more research-based career, found out about the studentships, and made the shift from
IT consulting. |
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| 3. What did you study at university? |
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Electrical Engineering (culminating in a Master's research project in computer speech
recognition), at the University of Waterloo in Canada, followed a few years later by a
PhD at Oxford, England, in particle physics grid computing for the CERN-based LHCb
experiment. |
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| 4. What did you want to be at school? |
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Initially I was hoping to do more digital design, but my internships steered me towards
scientific computing. |
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| 5. What are the highlights of your job? |
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Learning new things (like particle physics, computational finance, and structural biology),
and thinking of novel ways to apply the power of the Internet, inexpensive CPUs, and new
technology such as instant messaging, file sharing, and grid computing to advance science. |
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| 6. What are the lowlights of your job? |
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Working with buggy or undocumented software and maintaining computer systems. |
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| 7. What do you do when you're not at work? |
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Try to get outdoors with my family, whatever the weather: cycling, sailing, running, hiking,
climbing, canoing. |
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| 8. What are your goals for the next year? |
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To establish an operating grid computing environment for our community of approximately 100
structural biology labs, based around a web-portal, and interfacing to our local resources
and also Open Science Grid and TeraGrid.
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| 9. Would you encourage your children to get in to grid and IT? |
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Perhaps not IT, as it is too broad a field and I think in the next decade we will see
systems and software mature to the point that many IT jobs will require less insight, skill,
and excitement, therefore providing a less rewarding career. Grid computing, however, will
increasingly become a mainstay of modern science, industry, and business. I believe it will
vastly surpass (and likely subsume) HPC in terms of the demand and impact, as it is more
broadly applicable. |
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| 10. What do you want to be when you grow up? |
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When I was in school, I wanted to be a mathematician. I'm sorry I didn't stick with that
ambition, but no one ever told me there were good job opportunities for applied mathematicians
until it was too late. Still, I got enough applied math doing EE. Now-a-days, I'd love to
stay in scientific computing, and like most people in this field I'd love to have my own
research group and manage (not personally!) a grid computing center. Maybe one day. |
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