Neil Bright Email & Phone Number

Boulder, Colorado, Us

Founding director of the NCAR Research IT (NRIT) organization, engaged to lead a digital transformation effort to restructure research IT at NCAR, moving from highly distributed functions spread across seven research labs into a single high-performing team that supports all labs and projects within NCAR.Strategically foster culture change within NRIT, enhancing trust through decision-making transparency and empowerment, and cultivating an environment of inclusivity and psychological safety.Increase the effectiveness of NRIT governance, providing guidance to NCAR Lab leaders and ensuring stakeholder alignment on priorities, costs, and future year activities.Support the NCAR research mission through architectural design, deployment, and operation of research IT services. Using inclusive techniques, empower the cross-functional NRIT team of 36 direct and indirect reports to identify opportunities for transformation, propose technical approaches, and execute implementation plans to optimize the utilization of NRIT’s $9M annual budget. Ensure compliance with organization-wide standards.Provide strategic, tactical, and technical counsel and support to senior NCAR leadership including representing NCAR on the CIO Advisory Council and participating in the Facilities and Enterprise IT Mission Support Councils.NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is a National Science Foundation (NSF) federally funded research and development center.

Auckland, Nz

Concurrent responsibilities with NeSI

Auckland, Auckland, Nz

Provided strategic leadership for NIWA and NeSI, cultivating a culture of inclusive collaboration, robust service delivery, professionalism, and a fierce customer focus. Developed strategic plans for a national-scale research cyberinfrastructure ecosystem in consultation with senior NIWA and NeSI leaders.Formulated plans for large complex projects, including augmenting architectural design, ensuring cross-functional integration across NIWA and NeSI, and contributing to the preparation of RFPs including supporting business cases, benchmarks, acceptance criteria, and the proposal review process.NIWA and NeSI represent the primary investment mechanism for high-performance research computing by the New Zealand government.NIWA, the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research, is a commercial entity owned by the New Zealand government. NeSI, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, is a virtual organization which is a collaboration between the University of Auckland, NIWA, the University of Otago, Manaaki Whenua / Landcare Research, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment.

Founding director of the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE). Led a highly skilled, cross functional team of 25+ professional FTEs providing research computing services to a wide variety of scholarly disciplines, with impact on more than 4,000 users and 360 faculty. At its peak, responsible for managing 67,000 CPU cores and 17 petabytes of storage. Responsible for recruitment, hiring, and management of staff, calibrating employee goals, performance assment, providing feedback via performance reviews, and promoting ongoing professional development. Held budgetary authority over a total annual budget of approximately $6 million in FY21. Participated in campus-level IT governance committees. Oversaw the evaluation of new technologies and generated RFP requirements and acceptance criteria for new acquisitions. Collaborated with faculty, post-graduate students, departmental, and centralized IT staff to facilitate the effective use of research cyberinfrastructure. Developed and maintained key performance metrics and communicated value to stakeholders.Culminating in 2020, executed a multi-year data center migration project and equipment acquisition of approximately 3 petaflops of PACE research computing and HPC infrastructure. Contributed to data center design requirements and devised a strategy to minimize the negative impact to research schedules during the transition while reducing the long-term cost to Georgia Tech. This strategy resulted in a projected savings of approximately $10 million over a five years. Developed a business plan and partnered with the CIO, Executive Vice-President for Administration & Finance, and Treasury Services to secure the commercial financing required for implementation. Collaborated with Procurement Services to establish purchasing contracts to competitively execute the necessary large-scale acquisitions.

Engaged in a campus-wide initiative to respond to new federal programs requiring adherence to NIST 800-171 controls when using CUI. Conducted a gap analysis and effected hires to implement a service aligned with these controls. Partnered with and influenced Procurement & Business Services regarding the purchase of research computing equipment and services. Developed relationships with and negotiated pricing with vendors. Developed relationships with data center operations staff and contributed to the design of an innovative new data center. Early career included significant RedHat Enterprise Linux and Solaris system administration experience, including all aspects of building HPC clusters and the systems, networking, and storage infrastructure to support them. Served as architect and technical lead for the campus-wide DNS & DHCP service. Implemented IPv6 enabled web, FTP and rsync services for the Georgia Tech Software Library (GTlib), a large collection of free and open source software available to the public.

Provided systems administration capabilities for the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) and Computing and Network Services (CNS). Integrated and maintained multiple myrinet-based HPC systems, including benchmarking and performance tuning. Assisted faculty with the evaluation of system requirements, vendor negotiations, and proposal budget preparation. Hired and managed student employees. Streamlined deployment of new systems by developing a method for unattended installation of Linux workstations and servers.Configured, installed, maintained, and provided user support of operating systems and software while ensuring a secure and stable computing environment. Installation, configuration, and troubleshooting of various IT services (nagios, VPN, DNS, YP/NIS, NFS, SSH, DHCP, email, TACACS, web).

Armonk, New York, Ny, Us

Wrote operating system level code in C++ for the AS/400 to implement the filesystem and networking portions of the Portable Application Solutions Environment (PASE).

Assisted with the object oriented design and implementation of software simulator for a CPU storage control unit.

Ported a large suite of biomedical applications from SunOS 4 to Solaris using distributed memory techniques.

Ms, Computer Science

Bs, Computer Science