This digital garden is an experiment in publishing some of the material I maintain in a private Obsidian vault as a supplement to my personal website.
Who am I?
I am a the Principal Technical Strategist1 at VAST Data where my job is to understand complicated workloads, systems, and architectures and explain how they will affect the future to both people inside and outside the company.
This role is an evolution of my career as a system architect where helped design some of the largest supercomputers in the world. I spent seven years doing this in the the U.S. Department of Energy complex, where I contributed to the design and evaluation of supercomputers including Perlmutter, Frontier, and El Capitan. I then joined Microsoft where I worked on the design of supercomputers designed for LLM training such as Eagle.
The long version of my life story can be found on my personal website’s About Me page.
What have I done?
From 2015 to 2023, I specialized in storage for HPC and actively participated in that community. I wrote a bunch of papers around file system performance analysis, reliability, utilization, and architectural philosophy. I also managed a team of storage engineers for a year and dabbled in the broader area of data management for scientific computing.
From 2023 to 2025, I specialized in learning how LLM training at scale was performed and translating those into system design insights. I supported OpenAI and played a tiny, tiny part in supporting the training run that resulted in GPT-4.5.
Why does this exist?
I maintain a lot of personal notes to help me remember things I’ve spent time figuring out, so notes like these would exist regardless of if I published them here or not. But I also really enjoy sharing what I have learned with others. I maintain this garden in the hopes that it helps someone else spend less time figuring something out than it took me. If you find it useful, don’t hesitate to send me feedback via Bluesky or email; I have realized that a kind word goes a long way in keeping me going.
Footnotes
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The title of “technical strategist” was made up for me, so that means I am the technical strategist. ↩