David Lee: The day job
My career has been in IT closely associated with science research:
nearly thirty years at Durham University,
over eight years at
ECMWF
(European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) in Berkshire
and most recently at the UK national synchrotron,
Diamond Light Source
in Oxfordshire.
Durham: As Systems Programmer then UNIX/Linux Team Leader, externally-facing results of my work included:
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Enabling us to be one of the first UK universities to connect to the then (1991) new-to-the-UK Internet, as part of the JNT Shoestring project and among the first to run and link with the DNS and NTP.
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Involvement in the SSMP "Fawn Book" definition and real-life library implementations.
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Designing and adding several new features[1] to the open source Samba package.
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Proposing and writing the GNU Autotools portability framework for the high-availability Linux-HA/Heartbeat/Pacemaker resilience project.
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The usual run of enhancements, bug reports, fixes and validity tests to other open source software such as sendmail, dovecot and MailScanner, and to proprietary software such as Sun's Solaris OS.
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Helping set up and support MantlePlumes. This international website continues to facilitate lively debate about different geophysical theories and models of mantle convection within the earth.
ECMWF: Our supercomputers are consistently high in the world's Top 500 list, and run by our section, with our team supporting its massive data requirements. My work included:
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Enhancing the ECFS filesystem interface
onto the multi-petabyte (reaching exabyte, i.e. 1018, in March 2024)[2] data archive,
including a complete rewrite of its client (Perl)[3] and a major restructure of its server (C++). This included porting the various server components to Linux, introducing and consolidating a build system under GNU Autotools and introducing git version control.
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Overseeing the transition and scale-up of the Data Handling System servers from an old set of about 15 inherited labour-intensive AIX servers to around 200 automatically provisioned and configuration-managed Linux servers.
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Various resulting contributions to the CFEngine configuration management library.
Diamond:
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Developing, maintaining and managing the automated OS deployment and configuration management framework across our many thousand varied Linux servers and desktop computers.
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Open-source contributions to CFEngine, CFE's policy-channel framework and Red Hat kickstart.
