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FAST '05
TUTORIAL PROGRAM

Overview | Tutorial Descriptions | Instructors

Training Instructors

Martin "Marty" Czekalski (T4) Marty Czekalski brings over twenty years of senior engineering management experience in advanced architecture development for ASICs, memory, and IO subsystem design.

He currently serves as Interface Architecture Initiatives Manager within MaxtorÕs Enterprise Products Technical and Strategic Marketing Group.

Previous industry experience includes engineering management roles at Quantum and Digital Equipment Corporation. Additionally, at Digital Equipment Corp., he was a key member of the Storage Strategy Task Force and the Next Generation IO Task Force, setting the directions for storage and interface strategy.

Mr. Czekalski has participated in several interface standards committees and industry storage groups. He was an Executive Committee Member and a Founding Member for the Serial Attached SCSI Working Group during its existence as the Serial Attached SCSI founding organization. He currently serves as Vice President and member of the Board of Directors of the SCSI Trade Association. Mr. Czekalski is also active with the T10 committee and the Trusted Computing Group.

Mr. Czekalski earned his MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, and his BE degree in Electrical Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

M.K. Jibbe (T4) manages the test architect group at Engenio Information Technologies, Inc. (formerly LSI Logic Storage Systems) in Wichita, Kansas. As an architect lead, Dr. Jibbe and his group define and design the test requirements and test processes for all the Engenio Storage products. Dr. Jibbe is an interoperability architect at Engenio. In this role, Dr. Jibbe verifies that the Engenio Storage products are compliant with various standards and interoperable with all the third-party vendors supported by LSI Logic. Dr. Jibbe has been awarded 16 U.S. patents and has published 27 papers. The patents and papers are related to areas such as hardware development (chips emulating RAID technology), software development related to RAID technology, protocols and network compliance, and test tools. Dr. Jibbe is an Adjunct Professor at The Wichita State University, where he teaches classes on hardware simulation, MPP, SCSI and Fibre Channel protocols, computer architecture, and other basic electrical and computer engineering classes.

David Nagle (T2) is currently the Advanced Development Architect for Panasas. Before joining Panasas, David was Director of Carnegie Mellon University's Parallel Data Lab, the leading university research group in object-based storage. During his tenure at CMU he was co-PI of the Network-attached Secure Disk Project (NASD) and led the Active Storage Networks and MEMS-based storage research projects. During the past 3 years David has worked with the ANSI T10 committee to complete the proposed standard (ratified in late 2004) and the upcoming OSD V2.0 standard.

Jim Plank (T1) is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. His field of specialty is fault-tolerant computing, with an emphasis on checkpointing and wide-area storage systems. He approaches the difficult field of coding theory from the point of view of a systems researcher, and he has published multiple articles that explain the mechanics of erasure codes and their practical value to the systems community. A seasoned instructor, Professor Plank has won six teaching awards during his twelve years at Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1993.

Spencer Shepler (T3) has been involved with NFS and its design and implementation for more than 16 years, first with IBM and more recently with Sun Microsystems. Spencer has also been involved with the definition and delivery of the SPEC SFS benchmark used to measure NFS server performance. Spencer has been involved with NFS version 4 design and development from the beginning and is currently the IETF NFSv4 working group co-chair and document editor.

Brent Welch (T2) is Director of Software Architecture at Panasas. Panasas has developed a scalable, high-performance, object-based distributed file system that is used in a variety of HPC environments, including many of the Top500 supercomputers. He has worked at Xerox PARC and Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Brent has experience building software systems from the device driver level up through network servers, user applications, and graphical user interfaces. While getting his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, he designed and built the Sprite distributed file system. Brent is the creator of the TclHttpd Web server and the exmh email user interface and is the author of Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk.

Ahmad Zamer (T4) is a Senior Product Marketing Engineer at Intel LAN Access Division. His work is focused on networked storage and iSCSI. Prior to joining Intel, Ahmad managed the PC business for Philips in North Africa and the Middle East. Ahmad has over 20 years of computer industry experience in the U.S. and overseas. He is an accomplished technical writer who has published more than 45 articles dealing with information technology and issues relevant to the computer industry. He is currently writing a book about networked storage.

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Last changed: 5 Dec. 2005 rc