Software Integration Group Staff

David Skinner earned his Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from UC Berkeley, where his research focused on quantum and semi-classical approaches to reaction dynamics and kinetics. David has been the lead technical advisor to the INCITE projects and has provided support to chemistry research at NERSC. He currently leads the SciDAC Outreach Center, which provides information and services that support SciDAC's outreach, training, and research objectives. David's publications while at NERSC have focused on the performance analysis of computing architectures and HPC applications. David is an author of the Integrated Performance Monitoring (IPM) framework.

Clayton Bagwell has a B.S. degree in Information Systems Management from the University of San Francisco and is working on his certification as an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP).

Shreyas Cholia works as a developer bringing grid technologies to the NERSC user community. His work in GridFTP-HPSS connectivity is expanding into a richer set of grid services for NERSC users. Prior to his appointment at NERSC, he worked for IBM as an HPSS developer and on-site consultant to the Storage Group. He has worked at NERSC since May 2000. He received his bachelor's degree from Rice University, where he double majored in Computer sciences and Cognitive Sciences.

Mark Heer serves as postmaster for nersc.gov email. He also creates user accounts on NIM, answers calls from users about their accounts, and generates statistics on NERSC users and usage. He joined NERSC at LLNL and has eleven years of related experience, including four years as Computer Operations Manager for a software development firm. Mark earned an A.S. in Natural Science at Ohlone College and continues to pursue coursework in computer science.

Randy Kersnick is a Bay Area local with a background in Computer Science and web technologies. Randy has programming experience in the areas of web applications and information portals as well as database technologies.

R.K. Owen received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley, specializing in atomic and molecular physics. His dissertation topic was quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods applied to lithium clusters. R.K. has over 25 years of experience programming in such languages as Fortran77, Fortran90, C, and C++. He worked at the NASA Ames Research Center supercomputer center for six years as the consultant responsible for the numerical computational libraries.

Currently, R.K. is the NERSC database software developer responsible for client/server packages to handle NERSC account usage and management. He has further experience with perl and php scripting, combined with SQL and Oracle PL/SQL.

His interests are code hacking, LINUX, developing Web page authoring methods, and software issues. Currently, he is the key maintainer of the environment modules package, and the chief (and only) developer of the 3x5 Cards project.

Jeff Porter started at NERSC in the early days of PDSF (back when the hardware was still crawling with Texas ants). Jeff has a background in physics and has worked on several large scale collaborative physics experiments. Jeff works closely with the Open Science Grid's emerging software.

Andrew Uselton joins the Software Integration Group as the first employee staffing the SciDAC Outreach Center, which provides information and support services for the SciDAC community. Andrew's responsibilities include establishing a web-based collaborative environment in which SciDAC funded research teams will have access to source code revision control, messages forums, mailing lists, task lists, an issue tracker and release management. Prior to joining NERSC, Andrew worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a developer in the Production Linux Group in Livermore Computing. In 1999, he was the second employee to join the team newly formed to explore running commodity Linux clusters at the lab. Andrew's early work included "powerman," a scalable, distributed power control application. He also worked on the testing and debugging of "petal/frangipani," a parallel file system. More recently, Andrew was deeply involved in the testing and debugging of the Lustre parallel file system. Andrew has a master's degree in computer science from Stony Brook University. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin.