References
Here are some commendations and letters of recommendation I have received:
To whom it may concern:
I am writing this document as a reference based on my experience with Mr. Scott Smith as an employee on my team.
Mr. Smith worked during 2010 as a part of my team at NOAA GFDL in New Jersey, in the capacity of system administration of GFDL's High Performance Computing Services. In particular, Mr. Smith brought expertise in SGI's DMF and TMF, as well as general IT experience in a broad range of areas, clearly gathered over a wide variety of employment experience.
Mr. Smith was proactive in offering solutions to problems, and completed tasks assigned to him in a timely and professional manner. Some of his work remains in daily use at the laboratory. I found him to be responsible, easy to work with, and generally very skilled technically. I would not hesitate to offer Mr. Smith a position with my team in future, and believe that any organization who retains his services will find that they have made a good decision, and will benefit from their association with Mr. Smith.
Phil, CSC Site Manager, NOAA/GFDL
To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is my personal recommendation for Scott Smith. Scott worked in my organization at SGI. He was contracted on-site at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratories (GFDL) in Princeton, New Jersey. GFDL was SGI's top data intensive customer with 8000cpus, nearline storage in excess of 250TB and offline storage greater than 12PB. Scott came up to speed quickly and worked very well with the SGI and customer teams supporting the environment at GFDL. Scott took self-initiative to learn, stayed focused and was always willing to jump in whenever needed day or night.
Scott was well liked by the teams he worked with and did an excellent job with communication. He ensured the customer and SGI were kept current of all activities. I found Scott to also be an out of the box thinker offering ideas to improve the operation at GFDL.
I highly recommend Scott for employment. He is a team player and would make a great asset to any organization.
Gloria, SGI Branch Support Manager
To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is my personal recommendation for Scott Smith. Scott has worked for me as a consultant in Procter & Gamble's High Performance Computing organization for the past 18 months. Scott lead the team responsible for all first, second and third level user and system support. He also served as a systems engineer/architect, drafting and executing projects to transform a poorly designed, organically grown system with numerous hardware profiles into a manageable and reliable service. He has both breadth and depth of technical knowledge in this unique and complex space. Few people have the talent, knowledge, and dedication Scott has consistently demonstrated. It has been a great pleasure working with him.
Being the team lead, he was essentially on-call 24x7 for escalation. This was not a requirement or expectation, yet he was still immediately involved whenever there was a critical issue. His excellent problem solving skills typically led to quick recovery, but when needed he would call on and direct any vendors or expert resources, holding strategy and troubleshooting sessions defining the path to resolution. He took personal ownership of any issue until it was completely solved.
Scott doesn't just concern himself with systems, he also seeks to improve the overall user experience. For example, he built a web interface for users to view job status, eliminating the need for command line knowledge for those less experienced. One of the biggest contributions Scott made was the identification and implementation of a robust help desk system that allows users to very easily report any issues and track progress against them. It has excellent email integration, so messages passed between team members are automatically captured and logged. Thus, it serves as a knowledge repository for the support staff, enabling the team to address incidents more effectively. The system also contains a web portal which allows management to track incidents, identify any trends, and ensure users' needs are being addressed appropriately.
Scott is a mentor. He has brought several team members on board, including an offshore staff of three. He is an excellent teacher, taking time to clearly and thoroughly explain highly technical concepts. He guides learning rather than just giving information, forcing people to leverage their critical thinking skills so they fully understand the subject. Scott also led several training sessions for our users. He has a keen ability to translate complex technical information in a way that is easily digested by those who aren't computer savvy. Aside from the technical, Scott has been my mentor from a management sense. I often seek his advice and perspective on a variety of business and political topics. I have grown tremendously as a manager under Scott's guidance.
There are two metrics that speak to Scott's abilities: quality days, and user satisfaction. Since Scott took the lead, quality days went from an average of 18 per month, to 28 per month, and user satisfaction rose from an average of 2/10 to 8/10. This was due to Scott's technical capabilities, leadership, dedication, and interpersonal skills.
I highly recommend Scott for employment. Because of his qualifications and experience, he will make immediate contributions and become an asset to any organization.
Samantha, HPC Section Manager
To Whom It May Concern:
Scott Smith has been an outstanding leader working at Procter & Gamble in the High Performance Computing Department. He quickly showed his leadership skills and outstanding talent in scripting LSF and working with applications from Feflow to Abaqus. He became our lead technician and helped coached several other system administrator's and worked closely with all the application managers.
Scott's dedication was outstanding; we could count on him rather it was 12 AM or 12 PM. He responds incredibly under difficult circumstances and always works till the problem is resolved.
Christie, HPC Customer Relations Manager
To whom it may concern,
This is a letter of recommendation for Scott Smith. I have worked with Scott for over two years- I highly recommend Scott for virtually any IT position; however, his experience with Linux, Clusters and Programming/Scripting in particular is exemplary. Scott solely managed a 400 node compute environment for several months in addition to several application servers and an SGI failsafe SAN. Scott's ability to handle tasks from server repair up to writing end user programs and scripts demonstrates his ability to both multitask and deal with virtually any scale of problem thrown at him.
In addition to being a great admin and programmer, Scott led (or rather pioneered) the re-design of the Load Sharing Facility (LSF) framework at Procter & Gamble Modeling and Simulation Cluster Network raising both performance and stability to a level heretofore unknown at the site.
Not only did Scott implement the re-design of LSF, he also wrote the first centralized user account management system for the HPC compute, application and service environment(s) all while still dealing with day to day HPC problems.
Please feel free to contact me directly via email or phone for further questions.
Jay, HPC Senior Systems Engineer
To Whom It May Concern:
Please consider this letter as my personal recommendation for Scott Smith.
I have worked with Scott for several years, getting to know him in a business and personal manner. I am always impressed by his work ethic, communication skills and having vast knowledge pertaining to his skill set. The manner in which he discusses with users about job application issues and taking ownership of problems for solutions amazes me. He is highly respected by both peers and management.
Having been in the HPC business for now over 25 years, there are rare individuals that have the skills and manners to accomplish all tasks set before them. But not only having these abilities but also more important is that they are a pleasure to work with, in discussing problems, solutions and goals for the future. Scott is such a person. I have been rewarded to work with such a individual in that he also challenges me to perform my duties better and I always looked forward to working with him.
Scott has brought to his present employer; leadership, communication and skills that have improved company resources that resulted in increased revenue and constant plans for future growth. As example he has overseen a large compute resource that has been in operation over 3 years. That resource must be online and available to users on a 7 by 24 hour basis, 365 days a year. On top of the availability, he also has implemented changes for continual growth and worked with vendors on future growth and upgrades.
Scott is and will be a tremendous asset to your company and adapts easily to making a positive impact.
John, SGI System Engineer
To Whom It May Concern:
It is a pleasure to recommend to you Scott Smith. It has been an honor to work with Scott for the past seventeen months in Procter & Gamble's High Performance Computing organization where he assumed the role of Onsite Project Manager for TEKsystems in addition to his regular system administrator duties.
A consummate computing professional, Scott is an accomplished system administrator, software engineer, storage engineer, systems analyst, and project manager. His analysis of the organic computer environment prompted Procter & Gamble management to allow him to lead a team of onsite system administrators and hardware vendors in a re-architectural effort that led to a significant increase in system responsiveness and reliability.
Through Scott's amazing programming abilities, users are able to run a variety of applications across the Platform LSF cluster environment using wrapper scripts created by him. When we updated our systems to LSF version 7, Scott reworked scores of scripts to work in the new “single cluster” environment.
The HPC Information site created by him also exhibits Scott's programming prowess. Users are able to check the status of running jobs by job, user, queue, or host. They are also able to check the status the various nodes, license availability, disk information and tape library availability. He also made it possible for users to reset all their passwords at one time from the web site.
Scott's time saving administrative tools are used throughout the day by all the team system administrators. His storage monitoring tools are critical in the effective management of the SGI Infinite Storage System. His scripts allow us to track usage of the Data Migration Facility and easily manipulate the tape storage. His user creation and modification scripts allow us to easily create and/or modify user accounts across a variety of different vendor platforms and operating systems comprising hundreds of nodes.
Scott took the lead in finding a help desk solution for P&G's HPC group. He analyzed the need and worked with a supplier to tailor their product. This resulted in a low cost solution that was easy for both users and administrators to use and maintain.
I admire Scott's ability to quickly analyze a system problem and determine the proper course of corrective action. Time and time again, he has uncovered a bug in one of our systems that stumped the best engineers from the vendor. Without exception, all the vendors respect Scott's knowledge and insightfulness.
I recommend Scott without reservation. Any company that employs him is getting the best of the best.
Rob, HPC Systems Engineer
To whom it may concern:
I have relied on Scott Smith's HPC expertise for the multiple Baby Care and corporate projects in the past 3 years. The projects spanned both new to the world HPC developments and LSF integrations, as well as administration and support for existing capabilities. On all occasions Scott delivered excellent quality work. Scott has an amazing grasp of the depth and breadth of the HPC environment, and is very proactive in his efforts for finding solutions for difficult scenarios. There were several situations in which he indicated flexibility and helped resolve situations to get the business going with smart short term solutions when there were constraints from the third party vendors or the environment itself. At the same time Scott was quick to recommend best practices influencing the architecture and third party products. People like working with Scott and being very approachable even in the midst of critical high pressure situations. I highly recommend Scott and wish him the best. He will be an asset for the HPC organization he works for.
Valsa, Systems Manager, Product Innovation
To whom it may concern:
Scott has been the lead systems administrator for Procter & Gamble's High Performance computing system for the past 3 years. (I have been a major client of Scott's as Section Head for the corporate Modeling, Simulation & Analysis Department). Through a period of doubling computing capacity and number of users, Scott has performed at a high level and been professional, and responsive. During his time as lead administrator, we have also made major improvements in reliability and customer satisfaction.
Mark, Section Head, Modeling, Simulation & Analysis
This is a reference and recommendation for Scott Smith.
Scott has been the lead high performance computing system resource. He has excellent system administrator, coding, and troubleshooting skills. Because of his vast experience he is able to find and resolve the difficult “needle-in-a-haystack” issues quickly.
When the systems experienced major system disruptions due to outside influences (i.e. lightning strikes to power resources for the data center), Scott and our other resources continued working to restore our systems until reaching resolution. This required working continuously for many hours.
Scott also successfully implemented a system to log, track, and communicate issues. This system also provides a documentation component for steps taken during resolution of issues. The database contains issues resolution data as well as system set-up and process documentation. It enables quick resolution for future issues and serves as a training aid for new resources.
Scott has also successfully trained and managed other HPC resources (including offshore resources.)
I would highly recommend Scott for an HPC position.
Lisa, Application Manager
To whom it may concern:
For the past two years I've worked as a developer of Procter & Gamble's Virtual Packaging Simulation (VPS), a Simulation Lifecycle Management system that allows CAE analysts to utilize HPC resources to automate workflows used for bottle testing. During this time, I've had the pleasure to work with Scott Smith as an HPC systems administrator.
Despite the high pressure and numerous requests of the system administrators in Procter & Gamble's HPC environment, Scott has always been very approachable, responsive, and quick to solve any system issues that I've faced as an HPC application developer. Not only was Scott extremely helpful in debugging issues but he would always make recommendations for improvements when he saw the opportunity. Scott's knowledge of LSF, shell scripting, and Procter & Gamble's HPC environment has saved me and my team countless hours of effort for both development and debugging.
In short, I would consider any company very lucky to have Scott join their team. I believe that he would be a tremendous asset to your organization.
Brian, Principal Consultant, Sogeti
To Whom it May Concern:
Scott Smith has been providing hardware, software and maintenance service to the Procter & Gamble High Performance Computing (HPC) system for the last several years. He consistently works within the rules and regulations of the data center and is regarded as a safe and reliable person by building security.
I have had numerous meetings and conversations with Scott while he performed his duties in the HPC environment and he has always been agreeable to new methods of LAN and power cabling as well as rack and server set up. He performed escort duties for hardware and software vendors as well as assisting them in product installation and testing. He was instrumental in establishing the private intranet network for the HPC system as well as the interfaces necessary to run the network. He was also instrumental in setting up the tape backup service and providing the instructional manuals to continue the process.
It has been a pleasure working with Scott and I am certain his expertise in HPC systems will benefit any employer.
Joe, HP Data Center Engineer
To whom it may concern:
It has been my pleasure to have Scott Smith as our HPTC system administrator for these past few years. As a user of the system you know when you have a good administrator. You hope you rarely need them but when you do, they need to be capable, fast and competent.
Of course the real world will disrupt your reverie with some inevitable issues. Software updates cause an incompatibility somewhere, a vendor changes a script, a new system comes on line with different hardware. I could always count on Scott to develop and implement a timely solution that got me back on track, being productive and being able to again forget about system issues and continue my work.
I am very disappointed that some recent vendor decisions have taken Scott away from us. I would heartily recommend that you jump on the chance to secure his services.
Fred, Modeling and Simulation Engineer
To Whom It My Concern:
Scott Smith is a skilled professional who works fluidly with his team members and will go the extra mile to provide quality results.
Scott and I worked closely together at Reynolds & Reynolds as well as Procter & Gamble. I relied often on his technical expertise. During that time, he demonstrated the ability to use his business and technical knowledge to successfully implement innovative solutions. He was able to communicate technical requirements and manage customer issues in a professional manner. He was very easy to work with and highly competent.
Scott is a dedicated person always seeking new and innovative ways to provide services to the customer. He has a great business sense and vision.
Scott exhibits the dedication of an outstanding leader. He will take advantage of every opportunity set before him.
It is without doubt that I recommend Scott Smith. Through his work ethic, willingness, and devotion to everything he does, he will be an asset to any organization.
Brian, Senior Systems Engineer/Administrator
The following is an employment recommendation letter for Mr. Scott Smith:
I have had the opportunity to work with Scott since November 2005, after I joined Procter & Gamble's Modeling, Simulation & Analysis Department. During the past 2.5 years, I have observed Scott take on increasing responsibilities within Procter & Gamble's High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) Group, becoming a lead resource in maintaining and improving the HPTC System. He became an important "right arm" for the Procter & Gamble HPTC Operations Manager.
Scott's technical computing and people skills were a direct asset to our business. He applied his knowledge and creativity to implement fixes and improvements to keep our clusters running as efficiently and reliably as possible. He worked well with all his customers - Procter & Gamble managers, other IT contractors, our HPTC hardware and software vendors, and Procter & Gamble HPTC users (over 300 engineers and scientists) - providing excellent client customer service. He worked on creating and implementing training sessions for new users and was always very willing to help answer questions and offer assistance.
Scott was instrumental in setting up the HPTC "Help Desk" Ticketing System during the time I have known him. He transitioned the system from just a simple phone hot line to a full on-line traceable system where all (phone or web or email) submission questions and answers can be viewed on-line. This is of great benefits as users can check historical questions before submitting new requests.
Scott also did a lot of behind the scenes website development work for HPTC. He created the "HPC Information Page" from which users can check on job information, cluster status, disk/tape information, and request password resets. Scott also contributed to training pages with "How To's" and "FAQ's" - very helpful for new users.
I have been with Procter & Gamble 25 years and have worked with many contractors in my career. Scott's performance stands out. As and HPTC System User, I understand how system reliability and customer service directly impact analyst/engineer's productivity both for our department and corporately. Scott took on his HPTC responsibilities with excellence. I am truly sorry to see him leave Procter & Gamble but I am confident he will be a great asset in the next role he pursues.
Anita, Modeling and Simulation Engineer
To Whom It May Concern:
My name is Richard and I am part of the Multi-Physics Group in the Corporate Modeling, Simulation and Analysis Department at Procter & Gamble. I have worked very closely with Scott Smith over the past two years to integrate Zmat, a material modeling software suite, into our high performance technical computing platform.
Scott is extremely strong technically and has applied his skill effectively. He has played an essential role in the successful implementation of the Zmat. Scott has collaborated with me and several other vendors to ensure scripts are set-up correctly, and his deep knowledge of our systems has allowed him to quickly resolve communication issues across several OS and software systems. Scott always seeks first to understand the situation before trying to be understood.
I am sad that Scott will be leaving us since he has made a large impact here. I can say without reservation that I would highly recommend Scott for any position in the area of high performance computing.
Richard, Modeling and Simulation Engineer
To whom it concerns,
I have worked with Scott closely and extensively in an open source project a couple of years ago and we accomplished some great things. While the project was then, and still is, owned by me, Scott played a very pivotal role in not only the coding and even basic design/architecture of some pieces, but also creating development environments and version control systems to develop it within.
He has proven to me he is capable of not only project management, but he is also very easy and enjoyable to work with, and he also is a very capable PHP programmer, having coded some very clever pieces to our project, as well as very knowledgeable in SQL and database design and performance.
I would not hesitate to recommend Scott to any company looking for a motivated, capable programmer that is capable of much more than just programming.
Dan Ball, dB Masters Multimedia
To Whom It May Concern:
This letter is my personal recommendation for Scott Smith.
I worked for Scott as a private consultant while he was the CIO of Shore to Shore. I was hired to document the existing and future state of the company's system. I spent about 4 months identifying the needs and wants of all stakeholders and then Scott and I spent several months evaluating several commercial applications (buy) against the cost of in house development (make).
Being the CIO, Scott was ultimately responsible for all aspects of IT for a fast growing enterprise which did business in 7 different countries around the globe. The existing system had initiated in the COO's garage and had grown to support the business. Unfortunately, the early developer's of the system did not understand some basic system design parameters such as cohesiveness and coupling. User requested enhancements that appeared minimal would create unforeseen cascading glitches, infrastructure challenges abounded in several key operating countries and culture differences abounded as well.
Scott's easy going nature, superior technical prowess and eye for detail served him well during his tenure at Shore to Shore. Constantly addressing system short-comings to irate users, repairing a cascaded impact and digging directly into the source of problems were common place occurrences that he handled or delegated with diplomacy and urgency. Never one to let it wait until tomorrow, Scott rarely left an "after hours" issue unresolved.
I moved on to other assignments but have kept in touch with Scott. He is one of my most favorite resources to call upon to explain a technology that I don't understand. He's patient and knowledgeable but is able to communicate technology in ways even I can understand. He's humble, usually, personable and dedicated. The best kind of manager. I would work for him again, anytime.
Laurie, Business Analyst