Bj Kowalski Email & Phone Number

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Co-owner of First Light Observatory Systems. We design, develop, and support custom and commercial support systems for remote and robotic observatories. Our expertise is in system of systems architectures in both commercial and military environments with decades of experience in high performance networking, embedded command and control, and high performance computing.

Eden Prairie, Mn

Following integration with EMC, promoted to Vice President and responsibilities expanded to include the Dell OEM tape and entry storage products. Lead the expansion of the development team into China. Responsible for development and sustaining staff in the US (Minnesota, Texas, New Hampshire, California), Israel (Tel Aviv), India (Bangalore) and China (Chengdu).

Eden Prairie, Mn

Initially responsible for Dell Compellent Storage Center product development including hardware, firmware, software, and Phone Home capabilities. Responsibilities expanded to include ownership of the Dell EqualLogic storage product and the Dell FluidFile System NAS product. US based staff were primarily located in Minnesota, and Texas.

Eden Prairie, Mn

Responsible for the Application Integrations and Phone Home software components for the Dell Compellent product line.

Bloomington, Mn

Chief System Engineer in a High Performance Computing System group collaborating with industry and government partners in the design and development of Special Purpose Devices.Was a member of the leadership team providing system integration expertise for a commercially developed Special Purpose Device. Lead infrastructure integration team with responsibility for system servers, networks, operating system, and commercial software deployment in customer environment. Lead development of a… Show more Chief System Engineer in a High Performance Computing System group collaborating with industry and government partners in the design and development of Special Purpose Devices.Was a member of the leadership team providing system integration expertise for a commercially developed Special Purpose Device. Lead infrastructure integration team with responsibility for system servers, networks, operating system, and commercial software deployment in customer environment. Lead development of a mission application simulator which provided scientific staff the ability to model and deploy application flows on target hardware without performing complex development tasks. Provided business development technical support to executive team in pursuit of new opportunities. Responsible for evaluating new opportunities, formulating technical approach, and communicating with executive leadership, industry partners, and potential customer management teams. Lead adoption of Unified Modeling Language (UML) by the development teams to facilitate communications of complex architectural concepts with vendors, partners, and customers.Held Top Security level security clearance. Show less

Bloomington, Mn

Lead software development team creating infrastructure software for a High Performance Special Purpose Device. Lead software team performing design, integration, and test of an embedded tactical vehicle system consisting of up to four processing elements, a Gigabit-Ethernet switch, and embedded storage capabilities.

Calabasas, Ca

Promoted to Vice President responsible for leading world-wide multi-protocol router/switch software development. Responsible for development and support organizations in Minnesota, Utah, North Carolina, California, and India (Bangalore).• Instrumental in introduction of Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) philosophies to worldwide development organizations.• Instituted use of defect metrics to gauge feature readiness and customer release… Show more Promoted to Vice President responsible for leading world-wide multi-protocol router/switch software development. Responsible for development and support organizations in Minnesota, Utah, North Carolina, California, and India (Bangalore).• Instrumental in introduction of Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) philosophies to worldwide development organizations.• Instituted use of defect metrics to gauge feature readiness and customer release success.• Developed schedules and facilitated integration efforts for incorporation of multiple site development work products into single feature release. Show less

Brooklyn Park, Minnesota

Lead the establishment of the Minnesota Design Center for Xylan, a Calabasis, CA based multi-protocol router/switch provider. Responsibilities included securing facilities, support services, staff recruitment, and development and test responsibilities for the Xylan embedded OS software component.Led team performing systems analysis, architectural design, and development. Specific feature focus on redundancy, resiliency, cold and warm start procedures, installation, file systems… Show more Lead the establishment of the Minnesota Design Center for Xylan, a Calabasis, CA based multi-protocol router/switch provider. Responsibilities included securing facilities, support services, staff recruitment, and development and test responsibilities for the Xylan embedded OS software component.Led team performing systems analysis, architectural design, and development. Specific feature focus on redundancy, resiliency, cold and warm start procedures, installation, file systems, release and distribution mechanisms, and external management station interfaces. • Lead RTOS evaluation and selection effort for new platform strategies.• Lead team designing new systems software architecture, including the ability to distribute real time configuration and control information over multiple processors.• Participated in control software development for VxWorks targets. Show less

Brooklyn Center, Mn

As a member of the Research and Advanced Development team co-lead National Security Agency (NSA) funded research into ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology security approaches. This research effort resulted in the development of a commercial ATM security product. This product leveraged firewall techniques at the ATM control plane level making it transparent to the data services (such as TCP/IP and voice traffic) carried within the service. This product was implemented utilizing Xilinx… Show more As a member of the Research and Advanced Development team co-lead National Security Agency (NSA) funded research into ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology security approaches. This research effort resulted in the development of a commercial ATM security product. This product leveraged firewall techniques at the ATM control plane level making it transparent to the data services (such as TCP/IP and voice traffic) carried within the service. This product was implemented utilizing Xilinx FPGAs to provide wire-speed, transparent capabilities.During this time also served as the principal representative to the ATM Forum Security Working Group which developed the Security Framework for ATM.Held Top Security level security clearance. Show less

Eagan, Mn

As a member of the I/O Development team, responsible for the OS level architectural change to provide multi-threaded support in the UniCOS kernel for high-speed network interfaces for the Cray J90 and the Y-MP. Developed the HIPPI device driver for the Cray J90. Assisted hardware engineering in checkout and fault isolation on new hardware modules.

Brooklyn Park, Mn

Principal investigator on a collaborative DARPA research effort with Carnegie Mellon University called Gigabit Nectar. Responsible for development of the device driver for the DEC operating system to support the HIPPI (High Performance Parallel Interface) network interface development by Network Systems. Applied leading edge research to unroll the TCP/IP stack CRC functions and utilize in-place buffering to substantially improve performance of the MACH OS.Co-authored paper "A Host… Show more Principal investigator on a collaborative DARPA research effort with Carnegie Mellon University called Gigabit Nectar. Responsible for development of the device driver for the DEC operating system to support the HIPPI (High Performance Parallel Interface) network interface development by Network Systems. Applied leading edge research to unroll the TCP/IP stack CRC functions and utilize in-place buffering to substantially improve performance of the MACH OS.Co-authored paper "A Host Interface Architecture for High-Speed Networks".Upon completion of the Gigabit Nectar research effort assumed responsibility for the embedded firmware for the Network Systems HIPPI Switch products which provided all the network based as well as console based management of the product.Served as Principal Representative to the HIPPI Networking Forum.Collaborated with a small team in early multimedia and World Wide Web research. Early development efforts with NCSA Mosaic and HTML resulted in an internal WEB based sales department. Network Systems was acquired by Storage Technologies in 1995 and renamed the Network Systems Group. Show less

Minneapolis, Mn

A remote member of the California based development team responsible for development and integration of the Ultra Network OSI (UltraNet) software stack into Cray Research UniCOS for the Y-MP, X-MP, and Cray-2 products. Collaborated with Cray development teams to provide worldwide support for UltraNet hardware and software products to the Cray customer base.Successfully isolated a hardware design flaw in the Cray Y-MP low speed channel and developed a software workaround to address the… Show more A remote member of the California based development team responsible for development and integration of the Ultra Network OSI (UltraNet) software stack into Cray Research UniCOS for the Y-MP, X-MP, and Cray-2 products. Collaborated with Cray development teams to provide worldwide support for UltraNet hardware and software products to the Cray customer base.Successfully isolated a hardware design flaw in the Cray Y-MP low speed channel and developed a software workaround to address the flaw.Assisted in the isolation and identification of an UltraNet architectural flaw manifesting itself as poor transfer performance with Sun Microsystems interfaces. Show less

St. Paul, Mn

Lead small development team responsible for all device drivers for the ETA UNIX OS. This team was also responsible for the communications channel between the ETA mainframe and the external rack hosted I/O devices.

St. Paul, Mn

Responsible for the device drivers and networking stack of a port of UNIX System V to the ETA supercomputer architecture. Lead the design and development of a processor-to-processor communications mechanism using the STREAMS standard. Lead the port of TCP/IP and various BSD networking applications to the System V environment. Designed and developed Ethernet and HYPERchannel device support.

Eden Prairie, Mn

Responsible for providing technical consultation to the International Marketing Vice President. These duties included communicating development plans to the International Sales team and distributors, acting as liaison between the international distribution channel and the development team, and leading development activities specific to international markets such as localization efforts.I was also the chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee which included distributors and their… Show more Responsible for providing technical consultation to the International Marketing Vice President. These duties included communicating development plans to the International Sales team and distributors, acting as liaison between the international distribution channel and the development team, and leading development activities specific to international markets such as localization efforts.I was also the chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee which included distributors and their representatives from around the world. Show less

Eden Prairie, Mn

Roseville, Mn

Roseville, Mn

Responsible for the design of the operating system interface to the hardware emulating the IBM multiplexer channel.After a management reorganization served three months as a supervisor for a team of five Systems Programmers.

Roseville, Mn

Initially hired as a Systems Analyst and promoted to Senior Systems Analyst after 18 months. My responsibilities on the Special Projects team consisted of customization of the Comten IBM plug-compatible front-end software to meet customer unique requirements. My duties included all aspects of responding to customer requests including project management, sales support, proposal generation, system design, implementation, deployment, and support.

Edina, Minnesota

Responsible for customization of the Data 100 Remote Job Entry (RJE) emulation products to customer unique requirements. Emulation products that were customized included the Univac NTR, Control Data 200UT, the IBM 2780, the IBM 3780 and the IBM HASP RJE products. Customization's were performed directly in machine code or in assembler.

Master Of Software Engineering

Bachelor Of Arts - Ba

Education record