Byron Rakitzis

byron@rakitzis.com

Objective

Consulting and/or part-time work as a software architect and programmer, or researcher.

Employment History

As a member of technical staff I'm engaged in the ongoing development of Network Appliance's filer products.

As an independent consultant, I helped design and implement the Agile filesystem. I worked closely with the founders from the earliest days of the company's inception on high level design. My work included design and implementation of a B-tree library customized for use with filesystem snapshots, as well as performance tuning for the SPEC SFS benchmark.

Since mid-1996 I have devoted part of my time to a career in classical music. After two years of full-time study in the Netherlands I returned to the San Francisco area and have performed as a freelance flutist and bassoonist in the following orchestras: Boston's Handel and Haydn Society, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, Vancouver's Pacific Baroque Orchestra, San Francisco's Magnificat and the American Bach Soloists.

Implemented a two-pass Just In Time compiler for Java bytecodes to SPARC and x86 targets. The compiler stressed speed of compilation so that there was a considerable payoff even for Java methods being called just once. The code generator had hooks for running inside Sun's JDK and was used by Jive Technology as a proof-of-concept demonstration of the viability of its compiler products.

As the first employee, I developed the company's first product (the FAServer, a dedicated NFS file server) with two of the three founders.

The first generation products ran a proprietary microkernel and Network Applience's WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) filesystem on top of a RAID array whose control was implemented in software. My work on WAFL and RAID has been protected with the following patents:

• 6,480,969: Providing parity in a RAID sub-system using non-volatile memory
• 6,289,356: Write anywhere file-system layout
• 6,138,126: Method for allocating files in a file system integrated with a RAID disk sub-system
• 5,819,292: Method for maintaining consistent states of a file system and for creating user-accessible read-only copies of a file system

The projects I was solely responsible for design and implementation included:

• Driver for RAID-4 disk arrays, including enhancements for "hot plug" capability of new disks and fast rebuild during crash recovery.
• Port of the entire system to DEC's Alpha hardware.
• File system consistency checker (fsck) for WAFL.
• Remote backup (rdump) for WAFL.
• Basic block and time-slice profiling.
• Device drivers for NVRAM board and serial chip.
• Console mode, for serial lines and network (telnet and rsh) connections, including implementation of rshd client.
• Design and implementation of system administration interface (shell and Unix-like commands) and boot manager.
• Remote debugger interface, using GNU gdb, including serial line connection and core dump/savecore utility.
• EISA configuration manager.
• System logging (syslogd) facility.
• Network upgrade facility.

Additionally, my work at Network Appliance focused on tuning the filesystem for the SPEC SFS benchmark. This work covered the spectrum from high-level algorithmic analysis to low-level speedups written in assembly language.

Worked as the Unix system administrator for the Visualization Laboratory of the College of Architecture. I supported a heterogenous network of Sun-2, Sun-3, SGI and NeXT workstations. I was responsible for maintaining backups, postmaster and netnews administration duties, as well as for offering such help as informal tutorials on shell programming.

Education

Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Princeton University (1990).

Flute student of Wilbert Hazelzet in the graduate program of the Utrecht Conservatorium, the Netherlands, 1996--1998.

Published work and software

Paul Haahr and Byron Rakitzis, Es: A shell with higher-order functions, Proceedings of the Winter 1993 Usenix Technical Conference.

A free implementation for Unix of the Plan 9 shell rc.

An implementation of Gerard Holzman's pico picture editor with on-the-fly compilation for SPARC and MIPS targets.

Winner (Best Utility category) in the 1990 Obfuscated C Programming Contest (IOCCC).