About Me

Profile

A skilful individual who has extensive experience in the Linux, HPC and Cloud. Over the past 17 years, he has gained vast experience in the HPC market including sectors such as motor sport, education and research; and most recently supporting various Clouds for a major Telco. He has gained a very high accolade from his peers in the industry due to his dedication and hard work.

Before joining OCF, he gained an MSc in Advanced topics in Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, where he learnt the basics of Linux, parallel computing and MPI; which led him to a career path into HPC. As part of his final year he did a project in N-body simulation, which was the source for his start in the career with OCF.

In the early years at OCF he advanced his skills in benchmarking and took a very hands-on approach in tackling problems with products such as DL_POLY and CPMD. Within a few years at OCF, he gained a great aptitude in learning the basics of HPC and growing with with the pace of the industry with the support of OCF. He gained the fundamentals of HPC provisioning using CSM, Scali Manage and Oscar. With the extensive experience gained with CSM he developed the whole solution with comprehensive automated scripts to allow one-click cluster installations.

Further from this in the middle few years at OCF, since the inception of xCAT2, he has gained extensive experience in supporting customers with their needs in the HPC arena, and further from that provided several patches to allow xCAT to work in customer environments; these patches in turn have been accepted by the xCAT team. This has allowed him to gain the success of several high-level projects within OCF. The biggest achievement was being part of the xCAT development team working on getting deb based operating systems supported, such as ubuntu and debian. This is now actively being maintained by the xCAT2 developers for their IBM Power platforms, and Lenovo Systems X.

As part of the knowledge of the vast provisioning systems, he has gained experience in several customer applications including Fluent, Abaqus, StarCD, MpCCI, GTPower, NAMD. This in-turn allows him to quickly support customers with any problems that arise. In order for these applications to run successfully he has used several resource managers and schedulers depending on customer needs such as Torque, SGE, Slurm, PBSPro, MOAB.

In the latter years at OCF, Arif has worked on improving OCF’s software stack specifically using a configuration management toolset to, which has enhanced the productivity as well as speed of deployment. He has continued this over the years modularising and streamlining the process to speed up the process.

At Canonical …

In his spare time he likes to keep up to speed with several flavours of Linux, reading technology news around the HPC, Ubuntu and Raspberry Pis. From the social aspect, he is now an avid runner, represents the Steel City Striders and Hillsborough and Rivelin Running Club at various races.

Experience

Canonical Ltd – November 2019 to present

Dedicated Support Engineer

Supporting a customer in the UK, where Canonical have deployed many private clouds and many others that are to be built over the coming years.

Technologies covered include but not limited to
* Ubuntu Operating System
* Metal as a Service (MAAS)
* Juju
* OpenStack Charms
* OpenStack

Also get involved in patching and fixing bugs that are encountered by customers

OCF plc – Dec 2003 to November 2019

Technical Director

Working for OCF since 2003, I am responsible for the design and  architecture of clustering solutions for OCF’s public and private sector customers. I was drawn to OCF by the opportunity to test and develop my technical High Performance Computing knowledge.

I have developed high levels of expertise in cluster management systems, grid resource managers and a whole range of HPC development tools. This expertise allows me to act as a point of reference for OCF’s customers and contributes to OCF’s ability to design and deliver well balanced, technically advanced solutions.

Furthermore, my programming expertise contributes greatly to the OCF System Development team’s efforts to simplify the management of complex clustered systems.

My biggest contributions to the open-source community has been the on-going development of ubuntu in xCAT. I also take pride in supporting various xCAT customers using different channels around the web.

Designing and implementing projects such as Southampton, Warwick and Durham are the peak moments of my career at OCF. My most recent projects have also involved the implementation of Platform HPC 3.1, which power 2 of the top ten HPC clusters in the UK

Education

Queen Mary, University of London – Sep 02 to Aug 03

MSc Advanced Topics in Computer Science

Main Courses undertaken: Distributing Computing, Structured Documents and XML, Network Computing, Research Methods, Parallel Architectures and Algorithms

Dissertation: Experiments with N-body Simulation

  • Simulation of particles taking into account of gravitational force, density and velocity
  • Functionalities include oblique particle-barrier and particle-particle collision
  • Report including
    • research of algorithms concerning parallelising the n-body problem
    • the experiments conducted

Queen Mary, University of London – Sep 99 to Aug 02

BSc Computer Science and Mathematics

Main Courses undertaken: Software Engineering, Database Systems, Computer Graphics, Compilers and Interpreters, Programming Languages.

More Info

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/arifali