Chris Pepper

Objective

I am looking for an HPC Director or IT Manager position. I have 25 years experience in non-profit healthcare and 30 as a technologist, mostly in hands-on Linux/UNIX/storage administration. Over the past 10 years my role has shifted to technical management.

Skills

• Operations Manager: Helped manage HPC Group and led HPC Operations Team.
• System Architect: Selected technologies and designed HPC clusters. Selected data center colocation facility, determined requirements, planned deployment, and worked directly with vendors to prepare site. Served as team lead and set technical direction.
• System Administrator: Installed and managed servers (primarily Linux), providing a broad variety of services. Designed, installed, monitored, and secured integrated systems. Created scripts and pipelines for system and data management.
• Writer/Editor: Write technical articles and chapters. Edit articles and papers.

Professional Experience

IT Enterprise Architect & Operations Manager, HPC Team | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center | New York, NY | 2008-present. Prior roles: Sr. System Administrator, HPC Group; Sr. Systems Administrator, Bioinformatics Core; Systems Administrator, Computational Biology Department.

• Operations Manager: Led 6-member Operations team responsible for cluster management and uptime. Also interviewed, hired, and mentored several system administrators.
• IT Enterprise Architect: Drove selection and design of new co-location data center, specifying cabinets/PDUs/KVM switches, through cabinet & server layout, to network design and vendor liaison.
• High Performance Computing Administrator: Managed multiple high-performance Linux compute clusters (over 300 nodes with over 500 GPUs). Supported Next-Generation Sequence analysis and general-purpose computation using LSF and Grid Engine schedulers.
• Storage: Managed Dell EMC Isilon storage clusters (peak 50 nodes across 4 clusters, over 5PB), and 20PB of IBM GPFS (Spectrum Scale) storage. Designed and maintained data verification and migration pipelines, including asynchronous replication. Managed Sun Solaris storage servers for bulk data storage and Nexsan storage arrays for archival and backups. Maintained backup system based on rsync and cron.
• Data Management: Designed and supported parallel data verification and migration pipelines for next-generation sequence data, as well as backup and file inventory systems using rsync & ssh.
• Network: Managed small private Wide-Area Network, including ProCurve/HP/Aruba and Arista Ethernet switches, for HPC clusters. Maintained BIND and DHCPd.
• Architect: Evaluated and selected products. Designed integrated systems, particularly computation and storage clusters.
• Web: Maintained Linux web servers for external and internal applications and data analysis. Supported Apache httpd and many Tomcat applications, as well as SSL/TLS security.
• General: Maintained additional Linux servers for various applications such as email, research, and data distribution.
• PAIGE: Served as CTO for PAIGE, an MSKCC spinoff applying computer vision and machine learning to computational pathology (2019); remained involved through 2022.

Editor and Contributor | Securosis | Phoenix, AZ | 2006-present, part time. Securosis provides information security analysis. I edit every post and white paper until the company's focus shifted. I also wrote a few articles on security, firewalls, and macOS.

Freelance Technical Editor | Include Security | Brooklyn, NY | 2019-2022, part time. Include Security provides security assessment services. I edited penetration test reports.

Editor | DisruptOps | Kansas City, MO | 2018-2021, part time. DisruptOps developed a cloud security platform. I edited their blog posts until FireMon acquired them.

Senior Technical Analyst, Technology Infrastructure | Goldman Sachs | Jersey City, NJ | 2008. System Administrator, Linux & Solaris. Used cfengine and Nagios heavily; also performed latency testing with FreeBSD ipfw.

Senior System Administrator & System Architect, Information Technology | The Rockefeller University | New York, NY | 2001-2008. Designed, built, and managed various projects. Technologies included Linux (CentOS & RHEL), Solaris, Big-IP & HA clusters, HPC clusters, ssh, BIND, Apache httpd & Tomcat, Oracle (Database & 11i Applications). Trained new System Administrators. Technical Lead for UNIX Systems Group.

Writer/Editor

• Wrote articles, chapters, style guides, manuals, and templates for Bloomberg Businessweek, Macworld, Harper's Magazine, XO Audio, Stairways Software, Dan Frakes, Todd Stauffer, and TidBITS.
• Edited articles, books, documentation, and technical reports for Jean-Louis Gassée, Take Control Ebooks, the Cloud Security Alliance, O'Reilly Media, and the Apache Software Foundation httpd documentation and Tomcat documentation.

Education & Training

• Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY: New York, NY. Master of Business Administration. Graduation expected June 2027.
• Wheaton College: Norton, MA. Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in Computer Science and Mathematics, with minor concentration in English. May 1993.
• Vassar College: Poughkeepsie, NY. Junior year exchange student. 1991-1992.
• AWS Technical Essentials, November 2024.
• Presenter at Big Apple Research Computing Event (2018) and Macworld/Expo Pro Conference (1999)
• Arista Certified Engineer (2012)
• Isilon IQ Concepts and Configuration (2009)
• Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Certification #110-881-307 (2007)

Miscellany

• GitHub: https://github.com/reppep
• Organizer, Linux Lunch: Peer support group for HPC system administrators from local research and academic institutions (2004-2023)
• Customer Representative: IBM (2019) and Dell EMC (2017)
• Software Tester for the AG Group, Apple (over 1,500 bug reports, including security vulnerabilities), Bare Bones Software, Claireware, DayStar Digital, Dartmouth College, Ex Machina, Global Village, Green Dragon Creations, InterCon Systems, Lunatech Research, Mainstay, Men and Mice, MicroQue, Neon Software, Portfolio Systems, Qualcomm, Semicolon Software, Software Ventures, Sonic Systems, Stairways Software, Ultra-United, Velocity Development, Working Software, Ziff Communications, etc.
• Brooklyn Free Space: Webmaster and Mailing List Manager, 2005-2007. Trustee and Secretary of the Board, 2006-2007.
• Webmaster and System Administrator, Info-Mac Network, 2000-2006. www.info-mac.org was an extensively mirrored web and FTP site, hosted by MIT on FreeBSD as a volunteer project.
• Programmer, Logwrangler: a simple tool to analyze and tabulate web usage statistics using Analog. Also maintained the command-line port of Analog for Mac OS X/Darwin until my port was adopted by the Fink package repository.

Tech Tales: stories from my career