Mass Storage Group Staff

Jason Hick came to NERSC from Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was the acting lead of the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) team. Jason also served as the LANL representative on the HPSS Executive Board. Jason graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, with a B.Sc. in computer science.

Matthew Andrews joined the Lab after one and a half years with Intuit. Matt attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he earned his degree in electrical and computer engineering. He also worked at the university, gaining experience in AFS and distributed file storage systems.

Nick comes to Mass Storage from the NERSC Computational Systems Group, where he managed DaVinci. His experiences in managing large systems, integrating hardware into large production systems, working to identify and solve problems, and knowledge of system components will help the storage group manage and improve the HPSS production systems. Nick will help in numerous areas to include: NAGIOS w/HPSS, evaluating Linux movers, managing DB2, and testing/integrating new storage hardware into production.

Wayne Hurlbert shares responsibility for the continued development of storage systems and environments at NERSC. Prior to his position at NERSC, Wayne built storage systems at Berkeley Lab and Sybase Inc., and did compiler development at Ana Systems Inc. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from the State University of New York and a B.S. in computer science from San Francisco State University.

Akbar Mokhtarani came to NERSC from Berkeley Lab's High Energy and Nuclear Physics Computing Group, where he supported the BaBar detector at SLAC and the IceCube and Majorana experiments. His experience there includes migrating a database to new software, working on a Java/C++ monitoring system, and building and packaging simulation software. He is now applying his database and software development skills to the SciDAC Petascale Data Storage Institute (PDSI), for which he is gathering data and reporting on storage and file system reliability, and working on I/O benchmarking of selected petascale applications. He also works closely with the Science-Driven System Architecture and NERSC Global Filesystem teams.

Mike comes to Mass Storage from the Future Technologies Group in CRD, where he worked on two projects: porting GASNet via PORTALS to the Cray XT3/4 and performance optimizations on a class of multigrid solvers for AMR used in combustion and type 1a supernovae simulations. Mike's experiences in HPC software development, multi-threaded C programming, and complex software debugging will directly apply to NERSC's involvement in the HPSS software development collaboration. Mike primarily will help the group in its efforts to define a specific and more major role in HPSS development.