Speaker Details

Simon is the Research Computing Infrastructure Architect at the University of Birmingham. Working designing and building research data and computation systems. Recently much of Simon's time has been taken up designing and building OpenStack based private cloud systems including the pilot for the CLIMB project. CLIMB is an ambitious multi-University, multi-site deployment aimed at supporting microbial bioinformaticians and was built with Tom Connor (Cardiff University) and Nick Loman (University of Birmingham) and supported by the Medical Research Council. Simon enjoys challenging projects, and challenging the traditional approaches used which has led to the development of a private research cloud being deployed at University of Birmingham which includes being the first UK site to deploy Lenovo warm water cooling technology and even getting parts created to support the systems.

He is also chair of the independent Spectrum Scale user group.