Patrick Finnegan
Hardware Engineer
Patrick has worked with Research Computing since before finishing his undergraduate degree at Purdue. He worked to build the first centralized Linux Clusters out of reused desktop PCs, moving to administrate systems with AIX, Solaris, Debian, and Redhat Linux. Patrick has spent a lot of time researching alternative and novel architectures for computing, from ARM to POWER, FPGAs, Xeon Phi, and even IBM Z. He has become an expert in power and cooling systems, and designed and implemented several top 500 HPC systems using the resources provided by a 50-year old data center, including 415V power systems, Direct-to-chip liquid cooling. He now is the Research Computing Data Center Architect and designs and plans new system acquisitions to further Research computing's objectives, including physical design and construction for the Anvil supercomputer system.
Education
- B.S., Computer Engineering Purdue University (2004).
Engagement
- Photographer, Assistant staff advisor SC Conference series, Student Cluster Competition (2015-2018)
Presentations
- "TeleVideo Rises Again: Recreating a lost machine", Finnegan P. Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 16 (2021).
- "TeleVideo: Systems no one cares about, brought into the 21st century", Finnegan P, Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 14 (2019).
Other Activities and Fun Facts
- Private Pilots license (2020).
- Amateur Radio License - Expert Class (2019)
- Patrick is the staff advisor for the Purdue Linux Users Group.
- Patrick led the team that ran HPC system for the competitors of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. (2015-2016)
- Patrick has worked archive and explore computing history, including the TeleVideo systems he experienced in his youth, Digital VAX systems, IBM mainframes, and various supercomputers. He has a Github repository he maintains for his personal projects