In the Olden Days (1990s) baby programmers (or at least *this* baby programmer) learned from each other by being piled into one giant computer lab logged into one big compute resource, sharing “dotfiles” and overhearing fragments of conversations/frustrations.  Today’s distributed devices and hybrid work environment makes it a little harder to capture that same magic, but let’s see if we still can:  In this informal chat — not a single Greek letter! — Rob will show some of the useful tricks he’s picked up over 25 years in software development.   Topics include debugging, shell environments, obscure utilities from the early days of Unix, and other fun items.   Bring your own favorite tool, technique, or trick and we’ll show off to each other.

Bio:

Rob Latham is a senior scientific programmer at Argonne National Laboratory. After earning his B.S. (1999) and M.S. (2000) degrees in computer engineering at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA), he worked at Paralogic, Inc., a Linux cluster start-up. His work with cluster software including MPI implementations and parallel file systems led him to Argonne, where he has spent the past 8 years. 

His research focus is on high-performance I/O for scientific applications and I/O metrics. He has worked on the ROMIO MPI-IO implementation, the parallel file systems PVFS (v1 and v2), and Parallel NetCDF. 

See upcoming and previous presentations at CS Seminar Series.