Rick Munday

"Complex People for Complex Challenges"

Senior Consultant
Integral Corporation
1807 South Washington St.
Suite 110
Naperville, IL 60565

Recent activities:  

My personal research interests include High-performance computing and networking, Computer speech, Digital video capture and storage.

Other activities:  

Photography , Fish Keeping, Linux, and anything to do with the outdoors - Camping, Hiking, State Parks, National Forests and etc.. 

CASS - Commodity Architecture Storage Systems.

My latest work is focusing on the development of a robust, high-performance platform for data storage, nicknamed CASS. The goal is to build a system capable of supporting massive amounts of data storage (on the order of tens of terabytes) and to do it all with commodity parts. This helps keep the cost of the platform within a reasonable range AND has the added benefit of being able to obtain replacement parts locally.

CASS is an acronym for Commodity Architecture Storage Systems, and composes a complex, yet easily maintainable, mass storage system. The current design uses all off-the-shelf baseline components (i.e. motherboard, processors memory and disks) to avoid the high costs typically associated with mass storage systems that are currently out on the market.

Kryptonite is a functional example of just such a system. Currently, six are deployed and in use at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois, the heaviest deployment and usage by far is used by the folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey also located at Fermi. 

The SDSS crew has by far, the most data intensive needs. Estimating roughly 15TB total raw data over 5 years. And around 50TB total for "reduced" images, spectra and object info databases. They have been an invaluable resource in designing and improving our current line.

These current versions, support 1.6Terabytes of storage. Next generation design will support around ~4TB native. I have a small prototype located in my office. At 130Gb, this version is used for redundancy testing, availability design, and for development.

See the Kryptonite web pages for details, or read my paper (once it's available).

Performance Computing and Technology.

I am also interested in High Performance Computing and its related technologies and how they can be applied to everyday work.

For more information and pointers see my Performance Computing and Technology page (once it's available).

Short bio:  

Software.

Publications.

Talks.

http://www.parallelcrunchers.net/

http://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgabe/2000/06/Mosix/mosix.html

http://www.stpost.com/