University of Melbourne

Distributed People and Infrastructure

Aptira is an innovative Australian-owned technology consulting and services company. A trusted advisor to some of Australia's largest organisations, Aptira has deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, open source software, and helping to build an organisation's in-house technology teams.

Aptira

Chief Operating Officer

National Development Council

Technical Director, TalentTaiwan

National Institute of Cyber Security, Taiwan

Advisor

Taiwan's National Development Council (國發會) commissioned the Gold Card Office to provide resources and management for this crucial part of the National Development Plan. The Office operates internationally, targeting industries and geographies based on the nation's talent needs, and domestically serves as a clearing house for communication between the multitude of supporting ministries and agencies involved. Services are provided to Gold Card applicants and holders, with wide consultation with companies and community groups fuelling the program's continued development.

Taiwan Employment Gold Card Office

Generalist

The BCCT represents UK business interests in Taiwan, and Taiwanese interests in the UK. It acts to improve the general business environment and trade between the two nations, and provide resources to its members. BCCT works under contract with the UK Department for International Trade to execute government objectives, and runs several CSR programs to promote and reward responsible business.

British Chamber of Commerce in Taipei

Director

Chief Technology Officer

Chairman, Young Professionals Committee

Currently not taking on additional consulting work. Previously: Director, Architecture Strategy; Acting COO; IoT/Smart City Researcher; Field CTO; 5G Network Orchestration Architect; Acting CTO, Cybersecurity Advisor, Policy Advisor, Geostrategist.

Consulting

Consultant

Wrangled thousands of volunteers from 160+ countries into a coherent structure to deliver a portfolio of strategic projects.

OpenStack Foundation

Community Manager

During 2008’s global financial crisis, the Australian government deemed it prudent to spend an additional AUD 1B on research infrastructure. NeCTAR was a $50 million portion of that fund, aimed at bringing cloud computing to the research sector. Today it has transformed the way computing is delivered in the sector, used by a third of all researchers in the country.

I was employed as the architect of the cloud infrastructure, which was successfully launched just four months after starting. I designed the Request for Proposal process to approve $10M of funding for an eight-site, 30,000-core federated cloud. Once funding was allocated, I defined policy frameworks to ensure the operation of the cloud and led stakeholder management of cloud users, operators and related entities. This involved strategic engagement with adjacent government projects, representing Australian investment at international events and in the media, and building a beachhead into open source communities.

To accelerate development of the cloud, I also led the technical team for the first site. This involved managing a Dev/Ops portfolio of system administrators and software developers, designing and adhering to a multi-million dollar budget, conducting several competitive tenders and implementing a redundant multi-datacentre architecture.

During this position, I was recognised as a global expert on OpenStack, and co-authored the OpenStack Operations Guide, subsequently published by O’Reilly.

NeCTAR

Cloud Architect/Cloud Team Lead/Research Infrastructure Architect

After being recognised as a distributed computing operations expert, I used these skills to support new areas. I led the technical side of the distributed computing team for Belle II, the successor to the 2008 Nobel prize winning Belle experiment in Japan. Belle II was due for commissioning 10 years later and designing the distributed computing for it involved the estimation of computing hardware and human resources to support the USD 1 billion project. This required defining an organisational structure for operations and user support, a new central computing facility with 5M of hardware, and upgrades to international network links and 50 remote datacentres. I produced enormous amounts of strategic content, from schedules and budgets to training plans, security policies and risk assessments.

With AWS in beta at the time, I also conducted research into the total cost of ownership of cloud computing resources compared to on-site facilities and proposed a hybrid approach. With a team in Barcelona and Poland, I developed a job scheduling system to take advantage of cloud, grid and local cluster resources in a way that was seamless to the user. This involved significant organisational challenges, such as surfacing petabytes of data stores previously only accessible on-site. The work was recognised in the media and as an AWS case study.

Technical lead, Belle II distributed computing

The Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN, which led to the Nobel prize in 2013 for the discovery of the Higgs Boson, are the largest scientific experiments in the world. I worked on setting up the distributed computing infrastructure for ATLAS to make collaboration between scientists in 40 countries possible. My contributions culminated in Australia’s participation in the official inauguration event of the worldwide LHC computing grid.

Tom Fifield