Sébastien Valat
I'm currently a research engineer at ATOS/Bull on supercomputer products after making a PhD. on memory management on supercomputers at CEA and working at CERN on large scale (500 nodes) and high speed network application for data acquisition for future upgrade of LHCb detector in 2020. R&D effort in collaboration with Intel.
After getting two master degree in particle physics and computer science I made my PhD. at CEA/paris on memory managment for HPC (supercomputers). I pursued with two post-docs. One at the Exascale Computing Research Lab working on MALT, a Memory profiler.
I made, up to this summer, a second one at CERN working on a large scale research effort with Intel for the future data acquisition system to be used by LHCb detector in 2020 and being one of the bigest DAQ (without harware triggering) in physics experiment targeting a throughput of 40 Tb/s. It will be handled in front line by 500 servers and 10 000 optical fibers from the detector plus expected ~2000-3000 second line servers.
I'm now working at ATOS/Bull on filesystems burst buffers for again supercomputers.
I like open source and come at FOSDEM every year since now 5 years. Linux user since now more than 15 year, user of Gentoo since rougthly the same time. Most of my PhD. and post-docs works are now open sourced (MPC memory allocator, MALT [MALloc Tracker], NUMAPROF [a NUMA memory profiler], lhcb-dapiqpe [CERN R&D code for DAQ]) plus some other stuff maybe less usefull I made for myself and people who can want to look.
I like source code engeneering, hardly advocating for unit testing which is somehting not so common in my HPC and physics field. Mostly due to lot of historical software and lack of training on this topic and language not well suited to help making it (pure C, Fortran). I'm now looking on dead hours to use rust in this field.
I'm hardly invested in build system integration in most projects I worked on questioning myself on cmake/autotols and consors. I also built at some point my own source package manager for my home directory (homelinux, also on github) for which I still need some work to make it clean enough (admit that except for some feature uniq in my project, the spack project is now better).
In software I like opening the roof to look what is inside. It maked me enjoing a lot working on memory management and looking inside the Linux Kernel, FreeBSD kernel, OpenSolaris Kernel and Windows Kernel what append on this specific topic.