Hi, I'm Alan
AI / ML Infrastructure Engineer
AZ

About

Nine years building production systems in Australia, eight at the country's largest supercomputing centre. Designs and runs Python services that schedule, allocate and monitor GPU workloads across multi-tenant clusters. Built vScheduler, an open-source HPC scheduler for interactive GPU sessions, in production since 2022, with the accompanying paper published at ISC High Performance 2026.

Work Experience

Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (CSIRO)
HPC Software Engineer — Visualisation Specialist
Mar 2018 - Present

Designs and operates the centre's interactive GPU platform: scheduling, remote access and the infrastructure underneath it.

  • Designed, built and shipped vScheduler, a Python scheduling and orchestration service allocating GPU-backed interactive sessions across two production clusters — a Linux HPC partition and a Windows GPU cluster — unifying heterogeneous hardware under one scheduling model. In production since 2022 across 51 GPU nodes.
  • Implemented two allocation models in one system: on-demand scheduling via a custom load balancer that ranks nodes on live utilisation and health, plus reservation-based allocation validated against a booking service. No open-source alternative combines both; the capability previously required commercial products such as AWS NICE DCV and NICE EnginFrame.
  • Built the control plane end to end: socket-based telemetry agents streaming session and health events, a MySQL-backed state store as the single source of truth, systemd-managed services, and policy enforcement for quotas, walltime and fair-share.
  • Shipped a Slurm-style operator CLI (vmanage, valloc, vkill, vquota, vinfo, vreport) plus an HTML reporting and observability layer.
  • Architected for failure isolation and portability: separated control and data planes, per-site deployable modules and an optional booking backend. Open-sourced at github.com/PawseySC/vScheduler.
  • Operates the clientless remote-access platform — an Apache Guacamole HTML5 gateway brokering RDP, VNC and SSH behind a reverse proxy and institutional SSO.
  • Provisions the estate with Ansible across bare metal, KVM/Proxmox virtual machines and an in-house OpenStack private cloud.
  • Operates the centre's render farm and NVIDIA Omniverse environment.
Stake
Software Engineer
Mar 2017 - Feb 2018

Built the customer-facing trading platform in a regulated financial-services environment.

  • Built account opening, order placement and portfolio monitoring in Angular, integrated with backend REST APIs and market-data feeds.

Skills

Python
Kubernetes
GPU scheduling
Slurm
Linux
Docker/Helm
Ansible
OpenStack
AWS
Prometheus/Grafana
My Projects

Selected work

vScheduler MCP Gateway

In development

A production-grade Model Context Protocol server exposing GPU scheduling and cluster operations as tools callable by LLM agents. OAuth 2.1, per-tool rate limiting, structured audit logging, OpenTelemetry tracing and Prometheus metrics, packaged as a Helm chart.

MCP
OAuth 2.1
OpenTelemetry
Prometheus
Helm

Kubernetes ML Training Platform

In development

Gang-scheduled GPU training job queueing with Kueue, experiment tracking with MLflow, model serving with KServe and full-stack observability. Deliberately mirrors the vScheduler architecture on cloud-native primitives, with the MCP gateway driving live training queues.

Kubernetes
Kueue
MLflow
KServe
Prometheus/Grafana
Publications

Peer-reviewed work

A Scheduler System for Interactive Visualization on HPC Resources

ISC High Performance 2026, Hamburg

First author. System design, implementation and evaluation.

Contact

Get in Touch

Open to AI / ML infrastructure roles in Australia.