carl sylvia

My work for the Scalable Systems Lab focused heavily on systems research, networking and the Linux kernel in particular. My research into the inner workings of the Linux kernel focused on the implementation details of the task structure, scheduler, interrupt handling, system calls, device drivers, and processor affinity. My network research focused on implementing high performance networks with commodity hardware and protocols, Ethernet, TCP/IP and iSCSI in particular. Projects that I worked on included development of a virtual NIC driver to support the iSCSI protocol under Linux, and development of a kernel module to customize the partitioning of user and kernel tasks on large-scale SMP Linux clusters.

Joined company in 2004 to lead the development of the company’s next-generation federated search product. Duties included architecting, designing and implementing a Java/J2EE Web 2.0 federated search product to replace the company’s legacy monolithic C implementation. This next-generation product has since been successfully implemented and now powers numerous public and private sector search portals. In addition to my duties as the chief architect of the next-generation solution, I also served as the Lead Software Engineer playing a critical role in the design and development of all facets of the product. My implementation efforts focused on the product’s web services layer for searching of deep web content repositories, relevance ranking of federated search results, aggregation and presentation of results. A preliminary description of some of the work that I performed was presented at the 2005 Global Grid Forum conference, and may be reviewed at http://www.ogf.org/GGF14/GGF14IR.html

Manage software development and quality assurance for the State's integrated eligibility system. Led the architecture, design, implementation and deployment of all new projects developed by the State IT staff. These "next generation" solutions are developed using Java and Spring Framework technologies including MVC, Webflow, Data, and Security. The applications are deployed in a Redhat Linux environment with Pivotal tc Servers (Tomcat) and Oracle backend database servers.

Provide advanced web applications architecture and engineering consulting services.

* Directly responsible for the architecture, design and implementation of all internal and external enterprise business applications. All of our "next generation" products were developed using the LAMP stack along with numerous supporting technologies such as: Zend Framework, an MVC framework * Doctrine, an ORM for PHP * YUI, a JavaScript API * APC, a high-performance caching solution for PHP * Minify, a compression library for HTML and JavaScript * extensive use of AJAX to provide dynamic content * etc... The Department had hundreds of thousands of customers, of which approximately 300K are currently registered with our online licensing system. We process 10's of millions of dollars in licensing transactions each year. Maintained a state of the art high-performance online sales presence as well as numerous internal business applications.

My experiences at this company cover a wide area of the IT field including department management, project management, systems administration, and software quality assurance. I had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects at numerous sites throughout the US. As Operations Manager for the New Mexico facility, I was directly responsible for site Operations and Help Desk staff including shift supervisors, computer operators, network and systems administrators. Responsibilities included ensuring maximum system availability, successful deployment of new software releases, liaison between our customer and company senior management and software development groups, development and implementation of site policies and procedures and management of department's annual budget.

Provide technical direction for multiple teams of developers within the Operations Development organization of USAA.

My emphasis was on high-performance computing and my specific area of study was how to optimize management of processor affinity in large scale clusters (1Ks of nodes) with significant SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) capabilities.