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 and team leader, mostly in Linux/UNIX/storage administration. Over the last 10 years my role has shifted more toward management. I am enrolled in Baruch's MBA program.

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: I have written chapters for a couple books, a few dozen articles, a software manual, and product reviews.
• Editor: I edited another software manual, a corporate blog, dozens of white papers, penetration test reports, and an autobiography. As a volunteer I've edited thousands of articles, a few books, a magazine issue, and a variety of software documentation.

Professional Experience

IT Enterprise Architect, 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.

• Team Member, IT Hygiene Project: Work with Technical Owners and other stakeholders to document and manage applications.
• Operations Manager: Led 7-member Operations team responsible for cluster management and uptime. Also interviewed, hired, and mentored 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 rsync-based backup system.
• Data Management: Designed and supported parallel data verification and migration pipelines for sequence data, as well as backup and file inventory systems using rsync & ssh.
• Network: Managed 3-site 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 contract 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 edited every post and white paper. 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 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 & Applications). Trained new System Administrators. Technical Lead for UNIX Systems Group.

Systems Architect, The Gryphon Group, LLC: New York, NY. 1999-2000. Gryphon performed custom back-end development for high-end websites, particularly e-commerce.

• Systems Architect / System Administrator: Managed all Gryphon's Internet servers, running Linux, Windows NT, Solaris, IRIX, and Mac OS. Maintained client and Gryphon websites.
• Network Manager: Managed LAN and Internet connection.
• Project Manager: Helped define client goals and requirements, and created design specifications. This role included development coordination to ensure final product met client objectives.
• Training: Taught and supervised a Junior Systems Administrator.
• Assistant Director: Defined formal policies and procedures for project management. Supervised other Project Managers and Technical Leads to ensure best practices were followed, particularly in client interactions.

Web & List Manager, National Audubon Society: New York, NY. 1997-1999. The National Audubon Society is a non-profit environmental advocacy organization, which at the time had approximately 550,000 members and 510 chapters across the Americas.

• System Administrator: Installed and managed Windows NT servers providing web, FTP, mail, and mailing list services.
• Webmaster: Maintained and enhanced main National Audubon Society web site, personally creating over 1,000 pages. Expanded site from about 30 pages past 2,000. Managed and hosted additional sites such as AUDUBON magazine. Established free web hosting services, including FTP access and customized domain names, for over 100 chapters with over 2,000 web pages. Managed site redesign with outside design firm. Organized committee to define policy for Audubon websites, set requirements, and specified future directions.
• List Manager: Chaired Audubon's List Oversight Committee -- consisting of staff, members, and directors -- to set policy and review requests for new email lists. Trained new list owners. Created and expanded Audubon LISTSERV service to over 100 lists and 10,000 subscriptions.
• Networking: Assisted Audubon IS with LAN & WAN design and troubleshooting, and consulted on TCP/IP, AppleTalk, and general networking. Established and managed Audubon's DNS service.

System Administrator, Medscape, Inc.: New York, NY. 1996. Medscape was a free medical information website, offering content from Medline and a variety of other sources. We grew from approximately 20,000 to over 150,000 users during my time as its sole system administrator.

• System Administrator: Configured, maintained, and monitored all servers (web, mail, SQL, search, and general-purpose) and user workstations.
• Mailing List Manager: Managed MedPulse newsletter and emailed it weekly to over 100,000 subscribers using Eudora Internet Mail Server (the world's largest installation).
• Networking: Managed TCP/IP networks for both Medscape and SCP Communications, Inc.

Writer/Editor

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

Education & Training

• Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY: New York, NY. Master of Business Administration. Graduate Teaching Assistant (2025). Graduation expected 2027.
• Wheaton College: Norton, MA. Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in Computer Science and Mathematics, with minor concentration in English. (1993)
• Vassar College: Poughkeepsie, NY. Junior year exchange student (1991-1992).
• AWS Technical Essentials (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-present).
• 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. www.info-mac.org was an extensively mirrored web and FTP site, hosted by MIT on FreeBSD as a volunteer project (2000-2006).
• 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 (2003).