Alberto Cuesta Cañada

complex systems researcher and computer programmer

Curriculum Vitae

Here you can find my curriculum vitae.

Alberto Cuesta
 
mail@albertocuesta.es
http://www.albertocuesta.es
Visa Status

Temporary Resident / Spousal visa - No Sponsorship Required.

Under the BEE programme, I qualify as a South African of the same sex and ethnicity.

Skills
Management: Project and Team Management (PRINCE2). Able to interface with business and technical roles. Sense of priority and strategy. Able to mentor and train.
High Performance Computing: DataSynapse 4.2 and 5.1, Symphony Platform 3.1, 4.1 and 5.1, Microsoft HPC Server 2008 R2, XenServer, VirtualBox, Ganglia, Nagios, Logscape.
Operating Systems: Linux (debian, redhat and gentoo based distributions), Windows (2K3, 2K8, HPC) and Solaris 10.
Programming and Computer Languages: Java, Python, HTML, JavaScript, C, Bourne Shell.
Java Programing: Eclipse, NetBeans, Spring, Hibernate, Maven, Hudson.
Financial Markets: Financial products and trade lifecycle knowledge, including option and derivative pricing with montecarlo methods.
Languages: English and Spanish to a bilingual level, fluent Italian, notions of French and Catalan.
Work Experience
Excelian Ltd.
Senior HPC Consultant
London, UK
October 2010 - November 2011
  • Grid Engineer at Unicredit. Created a 4000 core cluster on Symphony 5.1 for an application that needed a 100x speedup. Provided development guidance and testing help for the migration of the application from 4.1.
  • Grid Support Manager at Prudential. Managed the transition from development to production of the SecondFloor application, running on the MS HPC 2008 Prudential grid. Created the 24/5 follow-the-sun grid support processes.
  • Grid Architect at Aegon. Architected and built the MS HPC 2008 Aegon Netherlands and United Kingdom grids, and trained the Aegon staff for their maintenance.
  • Grid Technical Manager at Rabobank. Conducted a health check on the Rabobank grid team and infrastructure. Assessed the short and long-term performance of the infrastructure at hardware, operating system and middleware levels. Assessed the application connection models, development practices, grid governance and support software. Implemented the grid security infrastructure.
  • Specialist Developer for Sanlam Capital Markets. Coded, as part of a team of three, the PoC for a trading system based on MonitorScript, an event-driven computing language; and the Apama libraries, a set of tools for the development of real-time applications.
  • Data caching java developer at BP. The developed application transfers market data from the in-house cache (FoBUS) to the Murex cache (MDCS), performing ad-hoc validation in between.
  • Grid and Cloud Architect for Excelian. Created the Excelian Grid as a Service PoC, offering cloud-based grid services to financial companies. This job included the full technological stack from hardware to client application, including client virtualization and scheduling.
  • Grid Upgrade Manager at Lloyds. Migrated the DataSynapse 4.2 grid infrastructure to version 5.1. This was done as a complete rebuild according to the industry best practices.
Excelian Ltd for Daiwa Securities
Grid as a Service Team Leader
London, UK
October 2009 - October 2010

Led the Grid as a Service Team at Excelian Ltd. The team provides completely managed state-of-the-art grid computing capabilities and ad-hoc grid projects to financial institutions.

This is a geographically dispersed engineering and support team, with members in two separate time zones (London, Tokyo). Coordinated them to provide uninterrupted support to several different teams with different requirements, as well as supporting the company strategic planning. Worked with tight deadlines and SLAs, while building business-wide trust in the skills of my team.

New technologies learnt during this role include Symphony Platform, Windows 2003 and 2008 HPC administration, network services such as DNS, DHCP and NTP, JIRA ticket tracking, LogScape and iLo interface server administration.

Trained others to develop and maintain the grid, generating documentation and tailored training schedules. Provided Datasynapse GridServer administration courses to business employees.

Excelian Ltd. For Royal Bank of Scotland
High Performance Computing Operator
London, UK
June 2008 - October 2009

Support and development of over 100 DataSynapse grids, using more than 3,000 Windows and Linux hosts. Ensured grid reliability, responsibility and teamwork.

Triaging and rational troubleshooting of grid application failures. Engaged with specialist teams to delegate or escalate issues. Handled disaster prevention and recovery, including the loss of complete datacenters. On-call support experience.

Optimisation of resource utilisation through resource sharing and harvesting, involving the use of 6,000 desktops and realising savings of over £6 million.

Experience in evolution and standardisation of large environments to drive down the maintenance costs. Installed the same security configuration, monitoring and software versions on thousands of machines of diverse origins. Procedures were routinely created to streamline our daily activities and those of the teams that we would delegate to.

Excelian Ltd.
Grid Analyst
London, UK
Feb. 2008 - June 2008

Designed and developed part of the Excelian Grid On Demand Framework, comprising 30 remote machines running Solaris and Linux. Responsible for the virtual image automated management and allocation, created using VirtualBox and Python.

Researched new technologies for its marketability to clients, including DataSynapse 5.1, Star-P and CUDA.

Instituto Tecnológico de Informática
Research Assistant - Complex Adaptive Systems
Valencia, Spain
Nov. 2005 - Dec. 2007

Maintained, modified and documented DR-EA-M, a Java peer-to-peer computing platform.

Built and maintained an eight-machine Linux computing cluster and system services for my research group.

Researched complex systems, chaos theory, graph theory and evolutionary computing, with published results in peer-reviewed English and Spanish conferences.

Education

Certifications

Symphony Platform Certified Administrator - September 2011

PRINCE2 practitioner - September 2010.

Polytechnic University of Valencia
Parallel and Distributed Computing MSc.
Valencia, Spain
Sep. 2006 - Sep. 2007

Parallel Computing with C and MPI, Grid Computing with Globus, Distributed and P2P Computing with Java. Good understanding of multithreading programming and scalability techniques.

Polytechnic University of Valencia
Computer Science Engineering
Valencia, Spain
Sep. 1998 - Aug. 2005

Specialized in artificial intelligence and bio-inspired computation. Broad knowledge of programming languages and computing theory.