HPC, cloud and neoclouds strategy

"As a result of this success, many call me a cloud builder. I prefer to think of myself as the architect who ensures the cloud actually delivers on its promise."

Firmus & SMC

Strategic advisor: narrative control & neocloud transition

During Firmus’s pivotal transition from regional operations to Australia’s first scaled-out neocloud, I served as the strategic advisor for market positioning. My work centered on navigating the complex tension between legacy operations and the emergence of Sustainable Metal Cloud (SMC) in Singapore. I influenced the Go-To-Market strategy by decoupling the power advantages of the Tasmanian site from previous volatile associations, instead reframing the asset as a world-class "AI Factory." By auditing the brand voice and aligning the value proposition for Singaporean VC interests, I played a decisive role in framing proprietary immersion cooling as a premier sustainable asset, resolving critical narrative friction and securing the brand’s posture for global investment.

MASSIVE

Executive oversight: architecting the sustainable research infrastructure powerhouse

I cultivated the strategic and structural conditions that allowed MASSIVE to evolve from a 2011-era imaging cluster as an early adopter of GPUs into a world-leading, cloud-native research infrastructure powerhouse. Beyond the technical oversight, I architected the institutional environment that enabled its "devopsification" and migration to the Research Cloud. By championing a transition from rigid HPC architectures to flexible, data-centric models, I removed the systemic barriers that typically hinder large-scale innovation.

Most significantly, I transformed the project’s fiscal foundation—moving it away from precarious "big bang" grant cycles toward a sustainable, yearly evergreening governance model. This shift ensured the facility could continuously modernize without service disruption, providing the stable, high-performance environment necessary to support over $250M in national research and 3,000+ researchers across the Australian Synchrotron and critical COVID-19 structural analysis.

The Research Cloud Engineering Centre

Pioneer: transitioning cloud & HPC into the data processing era

I led the global transition toward high-performance data processing by developing a world-renowned engineering centre. My focus was on re-training teams to lead at the intersection of OpenStack and HPC, creating a brand so distinct that Cambridge University noted in 2019: "Monash was the first to push HPC and GPUs on OpenStack... Cambridge has done it vice-versa."

Global Firsts: I positioned the Centre as an early adopter of Mellanox ConnectX (RDMA) technology, producing the world’s first (announceable) reference implementation in 2015, years before and triggering the technology achieving 70% market dominance.

Scale & recognition: In 2016, I led the build of the Southern Hemisphere's largest Ceph storage cluster, forging a partnership with Red Hat that earned "Storage Client of the Year" (2017).

Security & performance: My proudest achievement remains the seamless integration of DPUs for cybersecurity within the Research Cloud. This allowed sensitive data projects to co-exist with traditional HPC workloads on a single scaled-out facility, delivering massive efficiency savings without compromising performance.

VPAC

Founding architect: catalysing Australia’s computational talent & industry

As the second employee of the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) in 2000, I chose the frontier of HPC over traditional big tech. Over a ten-year tenure, I led the mission to catalyze computation-based industries across Australia. My work spearheaded a global geodynamics revolution, bridging the gap between raw processing power and complex physical models. This led to the development of geophysical software successfully exported to the United States and adopted globally. I extended this legacy of driving "impossible" data into the healthcare sector, pioneering early initiatives in biobanking and clinical data integration that transformed nascent infrastructure into a world-class engine for scientific discovery.