David Lee: The day job

As a Geophysics undergraduate at Durham University (Grey College) a major part of my dissertation was the computer interpretation of geomagnetic anomalies in Upper Teesdale in the underlying Whin Sill to determine the buried course of part of the pre-glacial River Tees near Langdon Beck.^[1] This interest led to undertaking an M.Sc. in Computing Science at Newcastle University.

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:

• Enabling us to be one of the first UK universities to connect to the then 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.
• Involvement in the SSMP "Fawn Book" definition and example implementations.
• Adding several new features to the open source Samba package.
• Writing the portability framework for the high-availability Linux-HA/Heartbeat/Pacemaker resilience project.
• The usual run of enhancements, bug reports, fixes and fix-validations to other open source software such as sendmail, dovecot and MailScanner, and to proprietary software such as Sun's Solaris OS.
• Helping set up and support the MantlePlumes website that facilitates lively debate about different likely geophysical 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:

• Enhancing the ECFS filesystem interface onto the multi-petabyte (approaching exabyte during 2023) data archive, including a complete rewrite of its client (Perl) 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.
• 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.
• Various resulting contributions to the CFEngine configuration management library.

Diamond:

• Developing and managing the automated OS deployment and configuration management framework across our thousands of varied Linux servers and desktop computers.
• Open-source contributions to CFEngine, CFE's policy-channel framework and Red Hat kickstart.

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