Contributor Index

James currently is the Vice President for Product Management, File Systems and Benchmarking at DataDirect Networks, where he is responsible for the technology direction, roadmap and performance analysis of DDN storage and filesystems solutions . One of his main tasks is engaging with and understanding the issues of organisations that are exploring the extremes of IO performance across the range of industries from Life Sciences through to Finance with use cases from Cloud, Enterprise Big Data though to HPC. James also directs the benchmarking projects at DDN with a team of engineers tasked with both sales-led and strategic benchmarking as well as performance characterisation. James’ career in High Performance Computing started with a PhD in Theoretical Physics. James then spent over 10 years at Sun Microsystems and Dell, in a wide range of roles from L3 support through consultancy, training, installation and pre-sales. James has specialised in the past in HPC schedulers, parallel programming and high-performance interconnects before turning to focus on IO and storage in a move to DDN in 2011.