Steve Wise

 

1602 Nickerson Street
Austin, Texas 78704
home: (512) 444-3310

mobile: (512) 789-3762
swise@aoot.com

 

 

 

EXPERIENCE

2004-2005                Director of Software Development – Ammasso, Inc. – Austin, Texas

Director responsible for producing software and firmware for the Ammasso 1100 Gigabit Ethernet RDMA NIC.   This was the first RDMA Ethernet RNIC available in the market providing up to 50% performance improvement vs. a standard Ethernet NIC.  Accomplishments include:

·         Directed a team of 7 engineers in Austin and Boston.  This team produced high quality software and firmware for versions 1.0 - 1.2 update 1 of the Ammasso 1100 product.  Software included Sockets, MPICH, DAPL, as well as low-level RDMA verbs interfaces to the RNIC.

·         Product management – defined product-level requirements for the Ammasso 1100 product.  Create Plan Of Record documents to track and schedule product releases.

·         Project management – created and tracked software/firmware development projects to ensure schedules were met with high quality. 

·         Level 3 Support Manager – worked with Level 2 and customers directly to resolve customer support issues.

·         Senior Developer for all software and firmware

 

2003-2004                Senior Engineer – Ammasso, Inc.  – Austin, Texas

Senior engineer responsible for producing firmware and host drivers for the Ammasso 1100 Gigabit Ethernet RDMA NIC.  Accomplishments include:

·         Team member developing the initial HW and SW design for the Ammasso 1100 product.  This includes proprietary hardware, firmware, and software architecture and design to implement direct placement of user data from the RNIC.

·         Designed the Ammasso  C language API to the RDMAC verbs.  This API was used to provide RNIC access for middleware layers such as DAPL and MPICH.

·         Lead developer for the Linux host driver supporting RDMA verbs.  This driver worked across all major 2.4 and 2.6 Linux distributions and supported direct placement of data and 100% kernel bypass for IO operations.

·         Team member developing proprietary firmware to support RDMA verbs, the iWARP protocol, and a network RTOS.

 

2002                       Senior Technical Staff Member – Omegaband, Inc. – Austin, Texas

Senior Engineer responsible for producing firmware and host-side drivers for an I/O consolidation device that performs TCP termination of Gigabit Ethernet into a 4X Infiniband fabric.  Technology developed includes:

·         Linux host-side TCP Intercept Module.  This allows offloading TCP sockets by bypassing the native Linux TCP stack.

·         Linux host-side SDP Protocol Module used to pass TCP socket operations from the host to the TCP termination device.  This also provided peer to peer SDP between Infiniband hosts.

·         SDP Bridge Module which bridged TCP connections into SDP connections.  This module also provides coalescing logic to efficiently transport TCP streams over SDP and minimize host CPU utilization.

 

2000-2001                Principal Engineer – Network Engines – Austin, Texas

Principal Engineer and project lead responsible for producing IP acceleration products in Network Engines’ Internet appliances.  Technology developed includes:

·         Asymmetric Multi-Processing (AMP) where the protocol offload firmware runs on one of the host CPUS as opposed to running on an intelligent PCI adapter.

·         DMA avoidance algorithms for AMP to take advantage of shared memory architectures.

·         Optimizations for Web traffic including providing new connection indication along with received data, and removal of TIME_WAIT control blocks from main-path lookups.

·         Support for offloading TCP/IP in BSD/OS Unix.

 

8/2000-11/2000                Founder & Software Development Manager – IP Performance – Austin, Texas

Development manager and senior programmer responsible for software development of high-performance networking products taking advantage of protocol offload technology. 

Project lead and key developer implementing the IP Performance Protocol Offload Engine (POE) technology that provides complete offload of the TCP/IP protocol onto a specialized adapter.  Technology developed includes:

·         Support for offloading TCP/IP in FreeBSD Unix.

·         POE Messaging Interface (PMI) – an efficient message interface for establishing offloaded communications endpoints.

·         Data indication coalescing algorithms to reduce PCI message traffic in the main data path.  This includes fast-path logic for the main TCP/IP fast-path case.

IP Performance was acquired in November 2000 by Network Engines. 

 

1999-2000                Senior Technical Staff - Power Micro Research – Austin, Texas

Consulting Project Manager responsible for developing new consulting business, managing teams of programmers, as well as maintaining productive relationships with existing consulting customers.

Project leader and senior programmer providing consulting services for HP and IBM.  Key projects included:

·         Offloaded networking technology including: host/adapter socket interface specification and implementation, an administration architecture, dynamic configuration of offloaded interfaces, and various networking performance enhancements both within the offloaded subsystem and the host system.

·         SMB network login enhancements for the AIX SMB server.

·         I/O Completion Ports for AIX.

·         NFS serviceability enhancements for AIX.

 

 

1997-1998                Founder & Senior Project Manager - journyx - Austin, Texas

Project leader and senior programmer for a team implementing a Java-based multi-tier database application developed using Visual Cafι for Java and Sapphire/Web.

Consulting Project Manager responsible for creating new consulting work, managing teams of programmers, and maintaining productive relationships with existing consulting customers.

Key programmer responsible for the design, development and maintenance of object oriented web-based distributed applications.

Key programmer responsible for the design and development of enhancements to a multi-threaded C++ SMB server written for the AIX O/S.  Enhancements included:

·         Mapping AIX filenames to DOS 8.3 filenames

·         Opportunistic locking support

·         NT Dialect support including UNICODE filenames

 

 

1989-1997                Advisory Programmer - IBM - Austin, Texas

1994-1997

Project leader and lead programmer for a team porting the INRIA IPv6 stack to AIX.  This included designing/implementing changes to the INRIA architecture to leverage the AIX Common Data Link Interface (CDLI) architecture, the AIX Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) Architecture, as well as AIX-specific networking devices.  Took an active role in contributing to the IETF in working groups that advanced IPNG technology.

Lead architect and programmer for the AIX TCP Kernel subsystem including the Sockets and Streams API frameworks, the Network Memory Allocator, the TCP/IP stack, the Routing Subsystem, and the CDLI framework.  This role included understanding current technology trends in the market place, and pushing to get those technologies into AIX.  Several major releases of the AIX TCP Kernel were under my direction including AIX 4.3.0 and 4.2.

Designed and implemented key performance improvements in the TCP/IP stack to increase performance in the web server environment.  Significant performance gains were achieved by redesigning how TCP/IP maintains its list of TIME_WAIT protocol control blocks.

Patents submitted and awarded:

·          5959974, Sep 1999 – System and method for discovering path MTU.

·          5892753, Apr 1999 – System for dynamically refining path-MTU estimates.

·          5812767, Sep 1998 – Dynamic registration of resolution routines within a data-link provider system.

1993-1994

Programmer on a team to enhance AIX networking performance by implementing copy-avoidance technology in the AIX networking subsystem.  This included design and implementation of the following technologies released in the AIX 4.1.1 product:

·         Performing the Internet checksum during the copy of user data into kernel mbufs for UDP.

·         Using a hash table to index protocol control blocks allowing efficient lookups when de-multiplexing input packets.

 

Programmer on the port of OSF 1.2 networking subsystem to AIX 4.1 to leverage the RS/6000 SMP hardware.  This task included re-designing much of the OSF architecture to enhance performance on UP as well as SMP RS/6000 hardware.

1991-1992

Implemented the AIX Serial Optical Link (SOL) Network Interface Driver (NID) for AIX 3.2.  This enabled TCP/IP to run over IBM’s proprietary high-speed/large MTU optical link.

Implemented the AIX FDDI NID for AIX 3.2.  This enabled TCP/IP to run over IBM’s FDDI device.

Key programmer on the port of BSD 4.3 Reno to RS/6000 for the AIX 3.2 release. This team designed and scheduled the porting of Sockets, TCP/IP, XNS, the MBUF allocator and IFNET drivers, as well as performance tuned the port.

IBM AIX representative on the POSIX P1003.12 group standardizing the Sockets and XTI interfaces.  This role included understanding how to be technically effective in a committee.

1989-1990

Programmer responsible for Licensed Program Product (LPP) testing for the TCP/IP applications including telnet, ftp, sendmail, BSD R commands, etc.  Developed and executed functional verification tests as well as regression tests to enhance the quality of the AIX TCP/IP LPP.  Drove this testing for the AIX 3.1 release.

Programmer on the TCP/IP support team responsible for maintaining the AIX TCP/IP LPP applications.  This role included working with the customer and solving problems, as well as fixing defects in the TCP/IP applications code base.

 

1987-1989                Programmer - Unisys - Mission Viejo, California

Programmer on a team responsible for implementing TCP/IP applications on the Unisys A-Series systems.  This included coding and testing of the telnet application.  This was a proprietary implementation.

Programmer on a team implementing the OSI protocol on the Unisys A-Series systems.

Maintained the proprietary remote login program, Station Transfer, which used the Burroughs Networking Architecture (BNA) protocol for transport.

      

EDUCATION

Graduated from the University of Texas, Austin in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science from the College of Natural Sciences.  Course work encompassed operating systems, computer architecture, networking, database design, and file processing.