LINKS:- ~kjc
WORK
I am a Principal Experimental Officer within the department and
I manage a team of six other Technical Support staff whose primary role is
to support the teaching and research activities of the department.
I am extremely fortunate to have such a talented team working with me,
they make my job a lot easier.
Within this group, there are PC and UNIX experts, a networking specialist
and the University's Apple Mac guru.
A PS file describing the Technical Support staff is available here.
A large part of our work is concerned with the day to day administration
and maintenance of the department's computing facilities.
The majority of the computers in the department are now PC based systems
running either Windows XP or Linux.
At the time of writing, there are about 300 PCs located in 6 student
labs and staff and PhD offices.
In addition to the desktop computers, we have a number of dedicated servers
which handle filestore (NFS and Samba), oracle, mail, WWW, DNS, WIN2k and
Citrix services,
a 16 dual CPU node linux farm which constitutes our main UNIX service.
The department's network is now entirely switched using HP Procurve switches.
Most of the systems are connected to the network at 100 Mbit, full-duplex
and some systems, such as the filestore servers, are connected at 1 Gbit.
RESEARCH INTERESTS (part-time)
I don't get much time to indulge in research, I find it quite interesting
although very demanding.
I have co-authored several papers on the following topics:-
- Parallel algorithms
On the PVM/MPI computations of dynamic programming recurrences
V. Alexandrov, K. Chan, A. Gibbons & W. Rytter
EuroPVM/MPI 97 (Krakow, Poland) -
Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1997
[postscript file available here]
On the PVM computations of Transitive Closure and the Algebraic Path
Problem
K. Chan, A. Gibbons, M.Pias & W. Rytter
EuroPVM/MPI 98 (Liverpool, UK) -
Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1998
[postscript file available here]
- Porting software
Porting under UNIX - Problem areas and a proposed strategy
K. Chan & D. Jackson
EurOpen & USENIX Spring 1992 Workshop (Jersey)
[postscript file available here]
- System performance testing
Incremental upgrade as a strategy for procurement
K. Chan, C. Charlton & J. Little
University Computing Journal 1992
Performance evaluation of workstation supported X-Terminals
K. Chan, C. Charlton & J. Little
UKUUG Edinburgh 1992(?)
WORK EXPERIENCE
I studied and completed a BA in Computational and Statistical Science and
Pure Mathematics at the University of Liverpool between October 1976 and
June 1979.
After graduation, I was employed by the University as an Experimental Officer
to help support and maintain the department's computer systems.
Apart from a brief sabatical in the early 80s, I have worked in the
department my entire career.
My background has always been firmly rooted in the areas of
systems programming
and
systems administration.
I have worked on, and looked after, a variety of systems including :-
- CTL Mod 1s running GINA,
- DEC & Systime VAXes running VMS,
- a DEC Micro-VAX running VMS,
- a Convergent Technologies MegaFrame running ATT SysV Unix,
- a High Level Hardware Orion running BSD 4.2 Unix
- and various Hewlett Packard systems running HPUX
(300s, 400s, 600s, 700s, 800s, E45s & L-class series).
I have also used the following programming languages extensively :-
Algol68S, BCPL, C, Ada, Java and 8080/6502/6809/68000 assembler.
I have actually used many other computer systems and languages as well but
I don't pretend to be proficient with their use.