John Snowdon

John joined Newcastle University in 2003, having previously worked for the Defence Evaluation & Research Agency (DERA) as a Linux specialist, delivering Linux training to the National High Tech Crime unit (NHTCU, subsequently SOCA).

Initially at Newcastle he worked in a Unix infrastructure development and systems programming role; designing and implementing the database, authentication and caching middleware technology, as well as maintaining the physical unix infrastructure for student systems deployed by the Faculty of Medical Sciences to both Newcastle University and the NUMed Malaysia campus. He designed and implemented the migration of legacy VLE and MIS systems and infrastructure from a monolithic Solaris environment to fault-tolerant, geographically distributed Linux clusters.

In 2014 he moved to the Science, Agriculture and Engineering faculty, supporting the School of Computing Science in their Linux infrastructure systems, subsequently taking over the head of the Computing Science IT service in 2015. During this time he was member of the School Executive Board and also part of the Urban Science Building design team, helping to design various teaching and research spaces. He also designed and implemented local, on-premise HPC (Grid Engine) and Cloud (OpenStack) infrastructure and continued to run the Computing IT service through to the dissolution of local IT, institution-wide, in 2020 when he then moved to the central IT service.

Since 2022 John has been the primary support for the Newcastle University Rocket HPC facility; providing advice and guidance to users of that system and other users with advanced computing requirements. John is a member of the HPC replacement project team and has had major input into the design and specification of the new Comet HPC service which is expected to come online in early 2025.

In 2024 he moved from the IT service to the Research Software Engineering team to focus on the delivery of future HPC services and the wider Research infrastructure needs of the university.