From 1987 to the present, worked as a systems
programmer/administrator for the phy.duke.edu subnet on the Internet,
in addition to regular duties teaching and doing research. This
heterogeneous subnet grew from two or three Unix hosts on a single
ethernet segment with a handful of Macintoshes and PC's to nearly
thirty Unix hosts, fifty Macintoshes, and ten PC's on a five-segment
bridged ethernet during this interval. In addition, acted as a
systems engineer consultant (unpaid) to start subnets and provide
initial training for neophyte systems administrators in the department
of Psychology at Duke, and the department of Physics at NCCU and
(paid) the department of Chemistry at Duke. The Chemistry and Physics
subnets are considered among the best designed and administered at
Duke.
In 1993-1994, acted as one of the faculty representatives on the
"Project Hermes" team designing an enterprise email and infrastructure
support system for the University. It can safely be said that a
considerable amount of the final hardware design for this project
derived from the analyses performed by RGB for this workgroup.
In 1994 also sat on a Security workgroup whose charge was to provide
the University with a coherent written security policy. In this
capacity, collected a number of useful white papers on network and
computer security and wrote most of the security
policy (postscript) document that, unfortunately, has yet to be
formally implemented. However, it still stands as the only set of
guidelines that are actually written down for establishing security
procedures and sanctions at the University.
In 1994 reviewed and (together with Rob Carter and Andrew Gallatin)
effectively rewrote from scratch the systems engineering and design of
a proposed upgrade of the Undergraduate
Computing Clusters (postscript document). This upgrade proposal
has served as the basis for the design that was eventually adopted and
that has been, for the most part, overwhelmingly successful. In
particular, the current cluster system is scalable at a known,
predictable cost and has significantly improved the availability of
computing and network access resources to the entire undergraduate
student body.
From 1990 to the present, served as an informal (mostly unpaid)
consultant many individuals in the Duke University Computing landscape:
Gail Corrado (assistant Vice Provost in charge of computing), Jesse
Eversole (assistant Vice Provost in charge of computing), Melissa Mills,
the assistant dean for Arts and Sciences computing, Betty Lecompagnon
(Vice Provost, CIO), Richard Palmer and Robert Wolpert (ITAC chairs),
Chris Cramer (Chief Security Officer) and many others. Sometimes my
advise was even sought;-)
From 1995 on, has been extremely involved in the beowulf movement -- the development of
commodity off the shelf (COTS) parallel supercomputers based on the Linux operating system. Built the
original beowulf at Duke, Brahma, a more recent beowulf
named Ganesh, set up
the Duke Beowulf User's Group
and has supported countless others seeking to build beowulfs.
In 1995 co-founded Market
Driven Corporation. This was originally a company dedicated to
predictive modeling and data mining using a highly advanced neural
network, Discovertm written by rgb. More recently the
company has evolved into a generalized web services company where
predictive modeling is just one component of its service offerings.
Currently is helping Immaculata Catholic School
build its technology infrastructure as chairperson of its information
technology committee (and principal hands-on volunteer systems
administrator).
to help spread the word so others can find it as well.
Note, Robert G. Brown is generally either rgb or rgbatduke on many external
sites crosslinked here.