We are very pleased to announce that Michael Seymour has accepted the position of Parallel Programmer and Scientific Cluster Administrator. He will begin his post on December 10th, 2007.

Michael has ten years of experience in this field. He has an M.Sc. Physics from Queen's University in Computational Astrophysics and has worked at the University of Toronto for both Ray Carlberg's group as the scientific software developer and system administrator and as the general system administrator programmer for the Atmospheric Physics Group.

Michael's job will be 50% devoted to system administration activities involving CITA HPC systems (primarily the Sunnyvale and McKenzie clusters) and scientific software and packages. Major duties include maintaining, upgrading and modifying the cluster hardware, OS, compilers and software applications (including massively-parallel scientific codes) for optimal performance. The other half of his responsibilities will involve scientific programming support by advising and assisting researchers with numerical algorithms, compiler issues, serial and parallel programming techniques, debugging, porting, and optimizing scientific codes on parallel supercomputing platforms; and organizing and leading seminars and workshops on cluster usage and parallel programming for researchers and students. From time-to-time, he will also provide some general administrative support with system administration of departmental servers, workstations, firewalls, website etc.