Tom Engel

Casual/High Performance Computing Specialist

Information

Bio

Tom is a casual NCAR employee, having retired in October 2017. He currently is assisting CISL's High-end Services Section with various internal projects.

In his time at NCAR, he provided technical leadership to NCAR's Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (formerly the Scientific Computing Division) for high-performance computing, storage and archive procurements; including the negotiation and monitoring of contracts and contracted deliverables. He also has headed CISL's High Performance Systems section, overseeing the supercomputing and mass storage systems groups.

Tom's previous work with Cray Computer Corporation and Cray Research, Inc. included management of software development and customer support groups as well as technical roles. He also led operational scientific research teams for weather modification and severe storms research experiments while employed by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.

A Fuller History

Tom's formal education was in the physical and atmospheric sciences; he received a BS degree from Iowa State University in Meteorology and Physics in 1974 and an MS degree from the University of Colorado in AstroGeophysics in 1977. While at the University of Colorado, Tom utilized NCAR's computational facilities for various research activities.

His first professional employment was as a research meteorologist for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation with the High Plains Experiment (HIPLEX) in Miles City, MT, from 1977 until early 1982. HIPLEX was a weather modification research project, funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. During the summer of 1981, NCAR's Convective Storms Division (CSD, now the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Division), along with numerous other national and international research groups, joined HIPLEX to conduct the Cooperative Convective Precipitation Experiment (CCOPE) - a single-season, intense study of summertime convective storms and, at that time, the largest study of thunderstorms to date. That fall, Tom collaborated with CSD to implement HIPLEX surface data analysis programs on NCAR’s Cray-1A.

In 1982, after a premature termination of HIPLEX by federal budget cuts, Tom was employed by Cray Research, Inc. in Mendota Heights, MN. In 1983, he transferred to Boulder, CO, to serve as a field support analyst and later as Cray's analyst-in-charge at NCAR, supporting application and system software development on NCAR’s two Cray-1A’s and installing NCAR’s Cray X-MP/4. In late 1987, Tom assumed the role of software technical support manager for Cray's Central Region, also in Boulder. In early 1989, he transferred with Cray Research to Colorado Springs, CO, to work on the development of the CRAY-3 supercomputer. Shortly thereafter, Seymour Cray and the Colorado Springs operation spun off as a new independent company, Cray Computer Corporation. Tom worked on the development, installation and support of the CRAY-3 systems, and supported NCAR during its evaluation and use of the CRAY-3 system that Seymour loaned to NCAR. Cray Computer Corporation filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late March of 1995, just shy of its demonstration of the CRAY-4 supercomputer. Subsequently, Cray Research, Inc. was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996, and then acquired by Tera Computer Company in 2000, which later renamed itself to Cray, Inc.

Between his time with Cray Computer and his return to NCAR, Tom was the Field Service Manager for Emtrak, Inc. in Colorado Springs, which was later acquired by Jenoptik, Inc. of Jena, Germany, as part of the Jenoptik Semiconductor Group. Emtrak was a manufacturer of advanced product tracking systems for integrated circuit fabrication facilities.

In February, 1996, Tom joined NCAR's Scientific Computing Division (SCD) as a Software Engineer and became head of the High Performance Systems Section of SCD in January 1997, a position which he held until June 2000, when he took the position of HPC Specialist for SCD. Subsequently, SCD was rebranded as CISL.

Between 2000 and his 'semi-retirement' in 2017, Tom managed the technical aspects of high-performance computing (HPC), storage and archival procurements for CISL, including the ARCS, ICESS, Linux Cluster (lightning), IMAGe Cluster (coral), AMSTAR, NWSC-1 (yellowstone), and NWSC-2 (cheyenne) competitive procurements. He was also responsible for tracking HPC technology advancements and contributed to the performance analysis, benchmarking and operational workload metrics collection and analysis efforts of CISL. Since October 2017, as a casual employee, Tom has assisted CISL with the NWSC-2a (casper) and NWSC-3 (name yet TBD) competitive procurements and helped CISL's High-end Services Section in various special projects.

Publications

Publications and Presentations (6)
Title	Source	Date
Yellowstone: A dedicated resource for Earth System Science	Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale, Volume Two	2015-01-01
System-level monitoring of floating-point performance to improve effective system utilization	SC '11 State of the Practice Reports	2011-12-01
HPC at NCAR: Past, present and future	Simulation Comes of Age: Cray User Group 2010	2010-05-26
HPC at NCAR: Past, present and future	Simulation Comes of Age: Cray User Group 2010	2010-05-26
HPC at NCAR: Past, present and future	Cray User Group 2010 Proceedings	2010-05-26
High-resolution hurricane forecasts	Computing in Science & Engineering	2010-05-20

Curriculum Vitae

Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, NCAR - Boulder, CO 1996-Present

Casual/High Performance Computing Specialist October 2017 - Present

Retired, though continues to assist the High-end Services Section of the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory on internal projects on a part-time basis.

High Performance Computing Specialist June 2000 – October 2017

Lead technical role in the specification, requisitioning, evaluation, selection and deployment of high-performance systems and storage procurements for CISL, worked closely with NCAR’s contracts administrators in all procurement phases, including preparation and negotiation of contracts and monitoring of contracted deliverables. CISL acquisitions include ARCS (2002), CISL Linux (2004), BlueGene/L (2005), ICESS (2006), NWSC-1 (2011) and NWSC-2 (2015), among other high-performance computational system and storage procurements, and the AMSTAR (2009) procurement of data archive systems – subcontract values ranged from under $1M to over $36M. Established, implemented and maintained tools and methodologies for communicating and sharing information during RFI, RFQ and RFP process lifetimes, negotiation strategies, award justification with the NSF, and subsequent tracking contract deliverables. Other responsibilities have included establishment of non-disclosure arrangements with industry leaders, technology tracking, lead role in CISL systems metrics implementation and tracking, systems workload and efficiency analysis, and myriad technical activities within CISL.

Manager – High Performance Systems Section January 1997 – June 2000

Managed a section comprised of approximately 25 systems engineers and administrators responsible for the installation, administration, monitoring and operation of high-performance computing systems, the NCAR Mass Storage System, and CISL’s electronic services infrastructure (email, shared filesystems, web servers, etc.) and desktop systems.

Software Engineer III – Supercomputer Systems Group February 1996 – January 1997

Responsible for the day-to-day maintenance, administration, operation and monitoring of eight supercomputer systems. Developed the NCAR Batch Priority Scheduler (BPS) for job scheduling and management on the supercomputers, and developed numerous tools and automated alert systems for the monitoring of supercomputer workloads, and anomalous software and hardware conditions.

Emtrak, Inc. - Colorado Springs, CO 1995-1996

Manager - Field Services August 1995 – January 1996

Responsible for the development and management of Emtrak product installation, training and field service procedures, strategies and business plans for an international customer base. Responsibilities included the strategic planning, budgeting, recruiting support personnel, and planning and implementation of corporate support infrastructure.

Cray Computer Corporation - Colorado Springs, CO 1989-1995

Senior Marketing Analyst January 1995 - July 1995

Provided technical support to the Marketing and Sales organization, including the preparation of technical proposals, development of suitable system configurations, product descriptions, and marketing strategies; also responsible for the development of customer and field support strategies and implementation of technical support systems.

Manager - User Software Products Development April 1991 - January 1995

Provided technical and administrative management of compiler, run-time libraries and software tools engineering groups for the CRAY-4 and CRAY-3 supercomputers. Responsibilities included development of Fortran 77, Fortran 90 and ANSI C compilers and CRAY assemblers, Graphical User Interfaces (X11R5 and OSF/Motif), Fortran and C intrinsic, high-performance I/O, automatic parallelization, and UNIX system interface libraries and software tools including an interactive, source-level symbolic debugger, performance analysis tools, and hardware simulators. Also led the checkout, installation, operation, and support of the first two production CRAY-3 systems and the development of corporate customer support strategies.

Manager - Software Tools Group July 1989 - April 1991

Developed and managed a group of software engineers implementing an innovative suite of software tools products, including run-time and GUI support libraries, an interactive, source-level symbolic debugger, and performance monitoring and analysis tools.

Cray Research, Inc. – Colorado and Minnesota 1982-1989

Software Engineer March 1989 - July 1989

Developed expert-system diagnostics and automatic test vector generation software to aid circuit design and testing of gallium arsenide IC packages for the CRAY-3 computer system.

Manager - Software Technical Support September 1987 - March 1989

Managed the software technical support group responsible for supporting Central Region customers, users and system software products. Group members provided customer and on-site system and software diagnostic and maintenance activities.

Analyst-in-Charge April 1983 - September 1987

Served as Cray's Analyst-in-Charge at the NCAR and responsible for maintenance of Cray's COS and IOS software product set, applications optimization for the NCAR scientific community, supervision of an applications analyst, and coordination of on-site hardware and software maintenance efforts.

Software Test Engineer April 1982 - April 1983

Performed software quality assurance and performance testing on Cray compilers, run-time libraries, user products and Cray customer applications.

Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation - Miles City, MT 1977-1982

Research Manager July 1980 - March 1982

Headed a small team of scientists and programmers in the design and implementation of surface meteorological observation equipment and real-time data acquisition, management and analysis techniques and software in support of the High Plains Experiment (HIPLEX) and the Cooperative Convective Precipitation Experiment (CCOPE), the latter conducted jointly with NCAR and other multi-national research institutions during the summer of 1981.

Research Meteorologist October 1977 - July 1980

Conducted basic research and the related field operations evaluating convective storm precipitation and its modification as part of the HIPLEX project, including the design of automated surface observation equipment and data acquisition and analysis systems.

Other Professional Experience

Fall 1981 - Contract with the Convective Storms Division of NCAR to port existing and develop new algorithms for the management and analysis of CCOPE data.

May 1982 - Received a joint two-year National Science Foundation grant for the analysis and publication of data collected during the HIPLEX and CCOPE experiments.

Education

Degree	School Name	Country	Field of Study
BS	Iowa State University	United States of America	Physics
MS	University of Colorado at Boulder	United States of America	Astrophysics

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