ACADEMIA
OCF appoints Arif Ali to Technical Director
Arif Ali to advise on new technologies and continue to improve existing supercomputing solutions
OCF has appointed Arif Ali to the role of Technical Director. Arif will use his in-depth knowledge of supercomputers to act as technical advisor to the company and find new and emerging technologies to bring into OCF’s solutions and services.
Arif graduated from Queen Mary, University of London, with an MSc in Computer Science and joined OCF in 2003. He has held roles as Software Engineer, Systems Architect, and Senior Systems Architect, before being promoted to Technical Director.
Since joining OCF, Arif has advanced his skills in cluster benchmarking and supercomputing generally and has taken a hands-on approach to tackling customer problems and developing appropriate solutions. Arif’s approach has led him to work closely with IBM as a key contributor on the Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (xCAT).
“[SuperComputing] is becoming more and more complex and customers require far more heterogeneous solutions, so Arif will help make sure that we’re ahead of the curve and can provide the most technologically advanced and suitable HPC environment for each of our customers,” commented Julian Fielden, Managing Director at OCF. “Plus, 10 years ago, customers simply didn’t know HPC like they do now, they’ve become far more knowledgeable. With new developments such as the cloud, we needed someone at director level to look at the future of new technologies so we can continue to provide the very best solutions for our customers.”
He adds: “Arif was the perfect choice for Technical Director, he has an eye for new technologies and we recognised that we needed his technical knowledge and expertise on our board.”
Arif Ali comments: “OCF is continuing to grow and has evolved, as the industry becomes more data centric, into a big data, storage management and analytics company. I’m excited to have input into the company’s strategy.