In April 1999, I moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands to work for RIPE NCC,
the administrative body
where European (and surrounding areas') ISPs declare their existence
and get their IP addresses from.
At RIPE NCC I have been busy
managing some dozens of systems for the Test Traffic project,
and luckily, I had little to do with the IP laundry business and much more with how we keep tabs on good user experience at European level!
In Amsterdam, I also had the privilege to work for
Greenpeace International,
mostly as a subcontractor
on various projects, which span in application from ships (onboard!) up to Head
Office's core network services.
In parallel to that, I got a Masters of Science/Doctorandus degree by Universiteit van Amsterdam by July 2002.
Both of these involved programming in Python,
a totally decent programming language to get along with.
Not only was I living in Amsterdam doing interesting Python stuff,
however all this happened
at the very building complex
where Python itself was first created. Well done! (let me brag a bit here...)
Soon after, I came back to Greece and got busy as a freelancer,
contracting with and for all sorts of business.
A major undertaking of the early days was to provide the infrastructure
for an SMS-based voting platform,
by connecting Upstream
Systems with the major mobile phone operators, as needed then for
live broadcasts,
which in those days meant Greek mobile phone carriers Cosmote, Vodafone and TIM.
These were the early days: Upstream Systems went on to become one of the most succesful Greek startup companies with a global footprint.
Then on, I have been working with the Grid, HPC, Cloud systems and
all assorted technologies.
* During the first decade, 2000-2010, I have been working on six distinct contracts, often overlapping, which relate in a way
to the work being done at CERN for the
Large
Hadron Collider project,
especially to the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) computing facilities or, to HPC systems.
* During period 2008-2010, I have been working for ETH Zurich, the Swiss Supercomputing Center CSCS,
assigned on grid cluster CSCS-LCG2 and the workload of project EGEE-III and especially its technicall training activities.
* During period 2010-2012, I have been working for CaSToRC, Cyprus,
leading in the User Support activities for the LinkSCEEM project and the -recently available- 35+TFlops Cy-Tera system.
* During period 2012-2014, I worked on a mission for University of Luxembourg,
maintaining and setting up the configuration of HPC sites and, filling many dots bridging Systems and Users.
* During period 2012-2015, I worked extensively in benefit of the EasyBuild open source project (Hello all - first user here!)
eventually also receiving as contracting job to deliver its documentation on readthedocs.org ; great result & very creative times.
* During period 2015-2018, I lived in the UK, Cambridge, working for
working for
illumina and primarily in favor of 100K Genome's project. The delivered platform has been the supercomputer which has processed
the most whole genome human DNA for clinical use, globally, receiving data of upwards of 40 sequencers.
* During period 2018-2021, I have been at EPFL, SDSC, with a primary focus on reproducibility of machine learning projects and infrastructure development.
Technologies used involve Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, Openshift, Rancher and several switch.ch-provided facilities. monitoring tools and so on.
Among other activities, I had been maintaining for a certain interval the
HPCBIOS
effort which is an attempt to streamline the computational environment
for domain scientists and ease the HPC users-helpdesk interaction. This work was inspired by facing the realities
while assisting struggling bioinformatics users however it became rich enough that it covered plenty of scientific domains.
Occasionaly, I get assignments from companies on Open Source projects,
mainly on fail-over design/implementation or large scale system design, as an ad-hoc Systems/Network Engineer (SysOps/DevOps, before these terms emerged).
Thoughout a previous decade I got specialized in High Availability systems design,
and rigorous application
of
Systems Reliability techniques (FTA, FMEA, FMECA, PRA) in Systems Architecture.
I am very eager to discover & deliver techniques that promote the Systems Administration domain,
emphatically so for Systems used in Scientific Computing.
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