Daniel Packman Email & Phone Number

I have been both a system administrator and scientific computer user for decades. Each experience informs the other. Knowing what users go through has made me a better sysadmin. It has been my pleasure to help people get their work done and have computers become a tool and not a hindrance.Another part of system administration that I love is the detective work involved in diagnosing problems. One memorable problem was a server that periodically failed, apparently due to a power supply failure. All the other servers in the room were fine. Only after putting a power monitor on the room's UPS did it become clear that the problem was intermittent brownouts from the UPS and the single server was just more sensitive to power fluctuations than other machines.Layered complexity makes the job always new. Initially one learns that a memory location is just a series of bits, on or off. Then, from the standpoint of computer code, one learns that one can interpret a memory location as either an instruction that can be executed or data. And this data can either be an address or an argument for an instruction. And these sets of addresses can create complex structures in memory that have their analogues in other areas. For instance, a binary tree structure can represent an ordered set of binary arithmetic operations. One of my first assembly programs manipulated a binary tree to optimize an equation by factoring.Static memory structures are fun, but dynamic ones are even cooler. A relational database, at its most basic, is just such a static memory structure. But relationships between tables can go in multiple directions so starting from a different point in a web of relations isolates a different set of entries within each table. These table occurrences can be visualized as set of identical clouds one on top of each other and a given query is a cloud to cloud lightning strike that travels from one cloud within a stack to others in different stacks.

Listed skills include Fortran, Parallel Computing, High Performance Computing, Mpi, and 39 others.