{"id":5623,"date":"2011-05-31T09:54:59","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T09:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/05\/31\/pnas-adam-deconinck-high-perfo\/"},"modified":"2011-05-31T09:54:59","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T09:54:59","slug":"pnas-adam-deconinck-high-perfo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/05\/31\/pnas-adam-deconinck-high-perfo\/","title":{"rendered":"PNAS: Adam DeConinck, High-Performance Computing Systems Engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists<\/a>, giving the responses of Adam DeConinck<\/a>, who works at a company providing supercomputing resources. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.)<\/i><\/p>\n

1) What is your non-academic job?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I work as a systems engineer at R Systems<\/a>, a company that provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources to the commercial and academic research communities. We own and operate a number of
\nsupercomputers on which we sell computing time, and often heavily customize the systems for whatever application our customer is using at the time. Our customers work in a variety of domains, including meteorology, finance and bioinformatics, but the thing they all have in common is that they have very large computational problems to
\nsolve and need access to hardware, HPC expertise, or both.<\/p>\n

I tend to think of my job as being in “research support.” I work on a day-to-day basis with other scientists and engineers by helping them to carry out simulations or analyses using unfamiliar tools. I work on the technical side, building and configuring compute clusters for our customers’ projects, as well as on customer communication and outreach
\nto various research communities.<\/p>\n

2) What is your science background?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a B.S. in Physics from Michigan Technological University and an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I left my PhD program at Illinois after realizing that I no longer wished to work in materials science, and the degree was unnecessary for the types of work I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

3) What led you to this job?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Leaving a PhD program is scary: except for a summer internship, I had spent my entire career so far in academia, and the culture in academia makes it difficult to imagine any other life. But while I was miserable in my program and no longer interested in my research, I had built relationships in the community that I did not want to give up–in
\nparticular with my now-fiance, Leigh. Thankfully, Leigh and my family and friends were incredibly supportive and encouraged me to search for work I found enjoyable and interesting. It helped that Champaign, like many research universities, is surrounded by private companies focused on commercializing and supporting research.<\/p>\n

My most rewarding experiences had been heavily computational, so when I started my local job search, I looked for work that would play to those strengths. Thankfully Champaign has a long history of scientific computing both at the University and in spin-offs, and I found R Systems.While I didn’t have a conventional background (no CS degree), I did join the company with a lot of experience from the user side of HPC. This has proved to be very helpful in working with our diverse customers.<\/p>\n

4) What’s your work environment like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We work in a large, open-plan office (no cubes!) with a number of tables
\nand office chairs scattered about, and a nook with a couch, chairs and a
\nTV. It’s a pretty relaxing environment, especially compared to all the
\nbasement labs in which I’ve worked. I also do some work in our two
\ndatacenters, both of which are very close to the office.<\/p>\n

5) What do you do in a typical day?<\/strong><\/p>\n

On any given day I might be setting up a compute cluster for a new
\nproject; helping a researcher solve a problem they’ve encountered with
\ntheir application; running benchmarks or evaluations using a new
\ntechnology we’re looking at deploying; or working on automation or
\ndocumentation. A given project might last anywhere from a few days to
\nover a year, so our setup is pretty dynamic.<\/p>\n

A lot of the work is very project-oriented, as you’d expect, but we also
\ndo a fair amount of R&D to try to make our clusters run faster and
\nexpand their capabilities. High performance is the name of the game, and
\nmy best days are the ones in which I can make a researcher’s life easier
\nbefore they’ve even asked for help.<\/p>\n

I also spend some time visiting customers to work with them directly,
\nand traveling to conferences to speak about HPC and scientific
\ncomputing. Those aren’t my typical days, but they can be a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

6) How does your science background help you in your job?<\/strong><\/p>\n

From time to time it’s been useful to understand a researcher’s
\nscientific problem in detail in order to troubleshoot their system.I
\ndon’t generally work on their code directly, but a good understanding of
\ntheir data and their software can be useful in ensuring their results
\nare valid as well as performant.<\/p>\n

More often, a background in science is enormously helpful in
\ncommunicating with the researchers using our systems. It’s not uncommon
\nthat working with us is the first experience a researcher might have in
\nHPC, and speaking a “common language” can make life a lot easier,
\nespecially in getting everything set up right the first time.Our
\ncustomers come from a wide variety of domains, and I can’t expect to
\nunderstand the details of the scientific problem as well as the
\nresearcher; however, I can often understand well enough to anticipate
\npotential trouble spots or opportunities, and translate the issues
\nthey’ll face working on our systems.<\/p>\n

7) If a current college student wanted to get a job like yours, how
\nshould they go about it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The traditional entry into HPC is through a CS degree, but there are a
\nlot of people who entered from other sciences. I know a number of
\nphysicists, chemists, and biologists who ended up in HPC through one
\npath or another. Most of them ended up doing some computational work as
\npart of their “regular” research, and ended up in HPC when they
\ndiscovered they enjoyed it. It helps to pay attention to the
\ncomputational side of your field, and look for ways to take advantage of
\ncomputing to solve research problems.<\/p>\n

It also helps to be a generalist, work with people in other fields, and
\ndevelop strong communication skills. That’s not necessarily encouraged in
\ngrad school where it can be easy to become very specialized, but being
\ngood at working outside your field of expertise can be helpful both
\ninside and outside of academe in general.<\/p>\n

8) What’s the most important thing you learned from science?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the most important thing I’ve learned is a deep understanding of
\nthe scientific process. The ability to isolate and test individual
\nvariables, look for possible causes of unexplained behavior, and have a
\nhealthy respect for both the usefulness of data and how easily it can be
\nmisinterpreted, has been useful to me in my HPC projects.<\/p>\n

9) What advice would you give to young science students trying to plan
\ntheir careers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keep in mind that you don’t have to work for a University, be a PI, or
\neven have a PhD in order to do science and work on interesting
\nproblems. The world outside of academia has many places for a person with
\nresearch skills and a scientific background. I work with commercial
\nresearchers on a day to day basis, and there are many other jobs which,
\nlike mine, focus on supporting researchers or building their tools.<\/p>\n

10) (Totally Optional Question) What’s the pay like? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Without being too specific, I’ll say that the pay in HPC is comparable
\nwith salaries in the rest of the technology sector, and is therefore not
\ntoo shabby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Adam DeConinck, who works at a company providing supercomputing resources. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.) 1) What is your… Continue reading PNAS: Adam DeConinck, High-Performance Computing Systems Engineer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451,57,7,59,11,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-jobs","category-physics","category-pnas","category-science","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}