CV

Thomas Wayne Hendricks

Professional Summary

Highly organized technical professional with a distinguished systems engineering career. Savvy technician with the ability to quantify organizational goals and establish appropriate policies. Passionate about new technology and highly focused on operational efficiency and reuse.

Career History

Senior HPC Engineer

Paige (Paige.AI), New York City
2022-Present

• Principal HPC engineer focusing on AI/ML imagery workflows on NVIDIA GPUs.
• Designed and built Azure/AWS cloud AI/ML HPC clusters and storage systems.
• Deployed tools such as Slurm, CycleCloud, Lustre, Weka, Netapp Files, and others.
• Key computing infrastructure resource to multiple AI/ML teams.
• Deployed cloud scheduling system and scaled from 5 users to 40+.
• Scaled from Pascal/Volta GPUs to Ampere/Hopper GPU and CPU systems.
• Integrated Dask and Prefect tools with the Slurm API for automated job scheduling.
• Assisted with the development of two ground-breaking histopathology foundational models.

HPC Engineer

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City
2018-2022

• Collaborated on DGX AI/ML HPC cluster with the Fuchs Lab and their spinoff company Paige.
• Conducted technical interviews from individual contributor to VP level and helped fill most of the early engineering staff at Paige.
• Served as an engineering consultant resource to the Research Computing and HPC teams.
• Expanded storage with Pure, Qumulo, and S3 by moving from a flat to a tiered model based on data usage.
• Assisted with the acquisition and leasing of a turn-key scientific datacenter facility.

Computing and Software Systems Research Engineer

California Institute of Technology High Energy Physics – CMS, Pasadena, California
2015-2018

• Principal administrator of the Caltech Tier2 cluster for the Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
• Deployed and maintained a 7300 slot HTCondor scheduling system with 4.5PB of storage.
• Collaborated with Fermilab, CERN, and other sites on LHC and Open Science Grid compute infrastructure.
• Managed a budget of $150k per year for hardware maintenance and refreshes.
• Developed a state-of-the-art SDN testbed for testing scientific workflows via contribution to EsNet.
• Redesigned the core network topology into a tiered model to minimize latency and increase redundancy.
• Deployed an R&D Ceph cluster for testing advanced features and contributing to the XrootD project.
• Presented at various conferences and institutions showcasing the work done by the Caltech HEP team.

Systems Analyst, IT Operations Management

Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2011-2015

• Principal Unix/Linux and network analyst on a small operations team that managed all university systems and applications.
• Conducted change management, incident management, operations monitoring, and documentation for all enterprise applications.
• Principal administrator for monitoring/metrics and mission critical 24/7 NOC alerting systems.
• Acted as a liaison to the Network/VoIP engineering teams and technical advisor to academic, research, and business teams.
• Coded large screen dashboard displays in Perl for ServiceNow, Tableau, CA Spectrum, and other APIs.
• Led evaluation of monitoring and metrics products for 20k endpoint VoIP infrastructure.

Senior Technical Analyst

FedEx, Memphis, Tennessee
2007-2011

• Provided production support for Unix/Linux sorting automation and command-and-control hosts.
• Deployed and maintained highly available SCADA systems critical to global logistics operations.
• Advised multiple teams on operating systems, DNS, web, monitoring, automation, and security.
• Constructed monitoring and response solution for worldwide critical SCADA systems.
• Designed and deployed systems for a new full-automated lights-out facility.
• Supported 900Mhz wireless and handheld device infrastructure.

Technical Analyst

FedEx, Memphis, Tennessee
2005-2007

• Assisted with the day-to-day operation of the www.fedex.com distributed infrastructure.
• Monitored production Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris systems across DMZ, ZMD, and backend.
• Provided first level support for all fedex.com C and Java/Weblogic applications.
• Organized and managed emergency technical conference bridges during incidents.

Intern II

FedEx, Memphis, Tennessee
2005

• Interned with the Systems Administration and Consulting group.
• Assisted with the implementation of new data center infrastructure.
• Retired a legacy request queue system by migrating to a new one.

Contractor/College Student

2000-2005

• Evaluated, designed, and implemented a building network and wifi upgrade.
• Constructed and maintained a new university departmental website.
• Developed and deployed a business backup solution for critical data.

Education & Training

BaSc in Information Systems Infrastructure/Security
ITT, Memphis, TN.

Corporate Training Courses:
Programming Perl, Linux Systems Administration, Managing Security in Software Projects, Firewall Techniques.

Conferences:
Regular attendee at various conferences such as Duke TechExpo, HEPiX, OSG/HTCondor Week, Supercomputing, ISC, NVIDIA GTC.

Technical Experience

Operating Systems:
FreeBSD, RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Alma, Oracle/Sun Solaris, MacOS, Ubuntu, Windows (limited).

Software/Tools:
Scripting (shell/perl/python/ruby), Web (XHTML/CSS, Apache, NGINX, Jekyll, Squid, Wordpress), Monitoring (RRD tool, Ganglia, Cacti, Nagios, HP Openview, CA Spectrum, PagerDuty, DataDog, InfluxDB, Grafana, Prometheus), Config (Puppet, Ansible, Salt, Terraform, Packer), Virtualization/Cloud (VMware, KVM/libvirt, OpenStack, Azure, AWS), TCP/IP (nmap, wireshark, tcpdump), Security/IdM (BSD Packet Filter, iptables, Nessus, hostapd, SSSD, OpenLDAP, Shibboleth, Okta, SentinelOne, Sumologic), Scheduling/HPC (HTcondor, Slurm, OpenMPI, NVIDIA tools), Storage (ZFS, DRBD, Ceph, Gluster, HDFS, Lustre, Netapp, Weka, Qumulo, Pure).

Hardware:
Servers (NVIDIA DGX, Cisco UCS, Supermicro, Dell, HP Proliant, Oracle/Sun Sparc, Raspberry Pi), Networking (Mellanox, Dell/Force10, Cisco NXOS/IOS, Arista, EdgeCore/whitebox, SonicOS), RF (LXE 6000 series, Ubiquiti Networks, UHF/VHF radios, Motorola)

Publications

1. SDN-NGenIA, a software defined next generation integrated architecture for HEP and data intensive science
   • Authors: J Balcas et al.
   • Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2017, Volume 898, 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2016), 10–14 October 2016, San Francisco, USA.
   • Link to Article
2. HTTP as a Data Access Protocol: Trials with XrootD in CMS’s AAA Project
   • Authors: J Balcas et al.
   • Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2017, Volume 898, 22nd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2016), 10–14 October 2016, San Francisco, USA.
   • Link to Article
3. High speed scientific data transfers using software defined networking
   • Authors: H Newman et al.
   • INDIS ‘15: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science, SC15: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, Austin Texas, 2015.
   • Link to Article
4. PRISM: A Multi-Modal Generative Foundation Model for Slide-Level Histopathology
   • Authors: Siqi Liu et al.
   • arXiv:2405.10254 [eess.IV]
   • Link to Article
5. Virchow2: Scaling Self-Supervised Mixed Magnification Models in Pathology
   • Authors: Siqi Liu et al.
   • arXiv:2408.00738 [cs.CV]
   • Link to Article

References

Available upon request.