Bio
Ryan is the group leader for the HPC Security and Information Engineering Group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). His group is responsible for delivering highly-scalable and reliable security services and telemetry platforms to the high-performance computing resources and staff at the OLCF.
Previously, he was a Senior Security Engineer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility where he spent 10 years coordinating incident detection, security system deployment, security policy development, and the hardening of supercomputing security architecture.
His background in Linux systems administration at scale helps Ryan understand the nuances of system complexity when developing solutions to security and operational mandates. Overall, he enjoys tackling technical challenges and tries to find creative ways to safely and efficiently enable research when OLCF security policy, technical computational limitations, or other roadblocks chafe against the OLCF research mission.
Ryan also leads the Software Deployment at Facilities (SD) area of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Its mission is to ensure that the Application Development and Software Technology products funded by ECP are buildable, testable, and available for use by ECP at the Office of Science supercomputing facilities. Major components of this work include developing supercomputing-specific enhancements to continuous integration tools like GitLab server and runners. Other effort includes using Spack to install scientific software included in E4S along with continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automatically produce build artifacts that users at facilities can pull in to their own from-source builds.
He is currently interested in understanding how to secure cloud compute platforms such as Kubernetes and OpenShift to an enterprise standard. He also co-develops and maintains an open source, Personal Identity Verification (PIV) compliant, secure password management and distribution tool called PKPass. Additionally, Ryan is one of the primary proponents of a message based log aggregation platform to help OLCF collect instrumented system data and deliver it to consumers that can influence decision making, reporting, and security policy.
Ryan holds a masters degree in computer science from the University of Tennessee. He previously was a certified Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) Exploit Researcher and Advanced Penetration Tester and has taught several computer hardware and Linux systems administration courses at Pellissippi State Community College as an adjunct faculty member.