John H Thompson

With nearly forty years of engineering experience, Hoot Thompson serves as CTO and lead systems architect for PTP, LLC, a Maryland based IT firm specializing in High Performance Computing applications. During his tenure at NASA, Hoot’s focus has been on storage and related technologies such as storage area networks (SAN) and shared file systems. In recent years, his concentration has shifted to virtualization and cloud initiatives.

As lead of the NCCS Advanced Technology group, Hoot works closely with candidate vendors assessing new hardware and software capabilities that have the potential to enhance the services delivered to the NASA science community. As an example, Hoot has spent significant time benchmarking cloud relevant technologies, in particular virtualized Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnects. This work culminated with speaking engagements at the 2011 Intel Developers Forum and the 2013 Red Hat Summit, as well as yearly presentations at supercomputing conferences. His research was one of the catalysts that led to the development of the ADAPT virtualized environment, the data centric environment that is providing new levels of personalized capabilities to the NCCS user community. Over the past year, Hoot has participated in a center wide initiative to build the OpenStack based Goddard Private Cloud using the knowledge developed in deploying ADAPT and its OpenStack extension.

Education:
B.S.E.E., Electrical Engineering, University of Virginia, 1976