MICHAEL J. ABBOTT
Unix Server Software Architect & Performance Optimist
www.repbot.org/mike
mikerepbot.org

OBJECTIVE

SUMMARY

• Technical architect experienced with multi-petabyte globally-distributed 24/7 production storage systems, high-performance multi-threaded real-time client-server 64-bit object-oriented server software development, and system-wide performance tuning.
• 29 years experience with C and Unix, especially networking and file systems.
• 22 years experience with multi-threaded programming and multiprocessor systems.
• 10 years experience with C++, 13 years with object-oriented programming.
• 8 years experience with Perl, 3 years with internet mail protocols, Java, and Objective-C.

PORTFOLIO

• Open Source Projects: State Threads Library and Accelerating Apache Project.
• US Patents: 5,751,280, 5,973,679, 6,654,933, 6,941,508, and 7,272,780 regarding streaming media.
• Samples: Code and technical documentation, available on-line.

EXPERIENCE

Apple, Cupertino, California    March 2008 - present
Senior Server Software Engineer
Contributed to the quality of two major releases of Mac OS X Server, Snow Leopard 10.6 and Lion 10.7.

• Enhanced and maintained open source components of the mail service including Dovecot and Postfix. More than quintupled Dovecot's scalability. Improved responsiveness for mobile users by adding support for key Lemonade features including forward-without-download, compression, and server-side indexing and searching of mail including non-text attachments (e.g. PDFs, word processor documents). Contributed features and bugfixes to the open source projects.
• Represented Apple with SPEC's mail server subcommittee until the latter disbanded. Led development of the SPECmail2009 benchmark. Provided anonymized data on real mail characteristics from Apple's corporate mail system. Received a SPECtacular award for my contributions.
• Measured and tuned the performance of Apple mail servers. Published a briefly-industry-leading benchmark result.
• Developed mechanisms for automatically reconfiguring services after a server's network configuration changes.
• Assisted other teams by fixing bugs in Xsan, Address Book, and several services.

Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, California    April 2003 - December 2007
Technical Architect
Managed, enhanced, and streamlined the distributed storage system supporting Yahoo! Photos, Briefcase, Groups, Shopping, Personals, and 40 other properties as it grew from tens of terabytes in one farm to several petabytes in dozens of farms around the world, serving a billion files a day to hundreds of millions of users.

• Designed, implemented, and documented hundreds of improvements to increase scalability, reliability, usefulness, and performance while reducing expenditures on capital and operations. Charted a long-term worldwide growth strategy. Identified and redesigned underperforming system components. Evaluated new hardware and strategized with hardware vendors. Refined the system into a mature managed storage service, easy for properties to join.
• Led a team of up to six local and international engineers and operators developing and maintaining the storage service. Introduced, assigned, and prioritized tasks while balancing the complex, competing business requirements of our client properties. Liaised with scores of other teams. Trained new team members. Instituted policies of sharing information and of documenting history, procedures, and best practices.
• Held ultimate authority and responsibility for 24/7 production operations of this storage service, safeguarding millions of dollars of revenue. Served routinely as the primary pageable on-call contact. Regularly audited configuration, security, backups, and performance. Devised and refined dozens of continuous historical data plots and extrapolations using open source software. Simplified, automated, documented, and outsourced operations whenever possible. Investigated complaints escalated from customer care. Mined content and access patterns for business intelligence.
• Managed the relentless, exponential growth of the amount of content stored. Collected growth data, projected trends, and predicted bursts. Planned capacity expansion and ordered tens of millions of dollars of hardware for just-in-time deployment. Presented and defended hardware orders and system architecture to executive review boards. Shepherded install tickets through the many stages of installation by disparate service groups.
• Significantly reduced the incremental cost of storage while considering capacity, reliability, density, power consumption, speed, and the ease and cost of operations. Reduced the number of servers per unit of storage by over 90%. Created and implemented a framework for transparently compressing stored content to reduce storage and save millions of dollars more. Deployed multiple tiers of storage farms based on different hardware platforms to meet the various business needs of the properties and to minimize cost.
• Conceived, implemented, and deployed a complete system of automatic fault detection, isolation, mitigation, and failover across geographically disperse data centers. Met the highest corporate standards for business continuity planning and high availability for mission-critical properties.
• Served as the primary security contact for nine properties. Conducted biannual compliance reviews of those properties. Improved, proselytized, and enforced security policies. Improved the prevention, detection, and remediation of abuse.

CacheFlow, Sunnyvale, California    October 2001 - April 2002
Senior Software Engineer
Developed a high-performance access logging subsystem for a next-generation web accelerator until the product was cancelled.

Silicon Graphics (SGI), Mountain View, California    July 1993 - October 2001
Software Engineer
Joined the Full Service Network interactive television project at its inception, followed through to its successful deployment, helped develop it into a few different products, and improved the performance of general-purpose Irix servers.

• Developed real-time, multi-threaded, 64-bit C++ data pumps to stream MPEG video and audio through raw ATM and UDP/IP with synchronized parallel, sequential, piecemeal, random-access, reverse, and looped delivery to thousands of viewers. Received US Patent 5,751,280 for synchronizing and 5,973,679, 6,654,933, 6,941,508, and 7,272,780 for indexing.
• Single-handedly increased the performance of the Apache HTTP server 900% as measured by the SPECweb96 benchmark and 200% as measured by SPECweb99. Ported Apache to SGI's 64-bit ABI. Created the Accelerating Apache Open Source Project.
• Led one other SGI engineer in more than tripling the performance of Netscape's FastTrack web server on Irix and captured the SPECweb96 world record. Granted all source code changes back to Netscape on schedule. Maintained a web server benchmarking lab. Contributed to SPEC web subcommittee meetings and SPECweb99 development. Authored the initial version of SGI's Web Server Tuning Guide.
• Led two other SGI engineers in developing an operating system abstraction layer based on Mozilla's NSPR and porting Brightmail's anti-spam mail server to it. Delivered complete, tested, documented package on schedule. Published a derivative work as the State Threads Library Open Source Project.
• Evaluated, performance-tuned, and debugged file systems, disks, network interfaces and drivers, mutex primitives, and a CORBA-compliant object communication system. Helped define overall software architecture.

Kubota Pacific Computer, Santa Clara, California    September 1991 - June 1993
System Software Engineer

• Began porting TitanOS, a System V Release 3.2 and BSD 4.3 hybrid, from the multiprocessor MIPS R3000 Titan machines to a new R4000 Titan upgrade, until the project was cancelled. Researched software techniques for managing cache-incoherent I/O.
• Ported MIT's X11R5 server to a 64-bit DEC Alpha OSF/1 platform. Shared with my peers my ground-breaking Alpha porting experience.
• Ported two proprietary file systems from TitanOS to DEC Alpha OSF/1, providing magneto-optical disk interoperability between those platforms. Included kernel modules, support commands, a comprehensive test suite, and documentation.
• Contributed to the quality of several TitanOS releases. Fixed scores of bugs throughout the kernel, network drivers, libraries, and utilities. Assisted customers directly with emergency problems.

Unisys (Convergent Technologies), San Jose, California    July 1989 - August 1991
System Software Engineer
Developed a multiprocessor version of System V Release 4 for the U6000/65 multiprocessor i486 departmental server.

• Participated in the Intel Multiprocessor Consortium, cooperating with Intel, NCR, Olivetti, and Unix System Laboratories to develop SVR4/MP for the 80x86. Multithreaded drivers and Streams modules. Critiqued and assisted in implementing USL's MP Device Driver Interface / Driver-Kernel Interface and revised drivers to conform to it. Developed start-up code for the additional processors. Developed and ported multiprocessor administration tools.
• Ported the Consortium kernel to a third-party multiprocessor machine and performed the initial port to the U6000/65. Cooperated closely with hardware and firmware teams to bring up the new machine.
• Developed multiprocessor extensions to the kernel debugger to allow independent control of each processor. Enhanced and supported the kernel debugger, crash dump analyzer, and related commands.

Software Engineer Internships
Encore Computer Corporation, Marlborough, Massachusetts    Summer 1988
Ported RPC and NFS daemons and libraries. Analyzed NFS performance.
Data General Corporation, Westborough, Massachusetts    Winter 1987, Summer 1987, Summer 1986
Developed system software for a standalone I/O processor. Analyzed system performance.
NOVA Biomedical Corporation, Waltham, Massachusetts    Summer 1985
Developed an application to maintain an inventory of fluid packs for hospital laboratory instruments.
Data General Corporation, Westborough, Massachusetts    Summer 1984
Integrated Unix releases for a native-Unix machine. Customized systems software.

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Sudbury, Massachusetts    1981-1985
System Manager
While a student, maintained and customized Unix versions 7 and BSD 2.9 on a PDP 11/70.

EDUCATION

SKILLS AND INTERESTS

My family, bicycling, model rocketry, pipe organs, pervasive social computing, ethnic foods, chocolate.

rev Jul 2011