Meet Sandy Smith
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CENTER SITE ENGINEER
Sandy Smith doesn’t “sit and do nothing” well. “I guess I’m the type of person that if my plumbing breaks, I’ll fix it. How do I fix it? Let me go on YouTube. It’s not that I’m cheap, I just like challenges,” Smith says.
She’ll build a shed or install an automatic gate – even if it means jackhammering rock or cutting concrete to do it. She’ll learn to paint or learn to fish. She’ll play with her dogs and travel the world with her friends and family. She might be convinced to sit on the beach, but only to watch her 34-year-old son play volleyball.
It’s that “can’t stop, won’t stop” attitude that she brings to Texas Biomed and overseeing the most powerful computers on campus – the High-Performance Computing Center (HPCC) – which is the physical backbone enabling the most advanced data analyses at the Institute to occur in record time.
“It’s fun having the fastest computers on campus,” she says. “There is never a dull moment.”
The HPCC has undergone a major upgrade in the past few years. Twelve state-of-the-art servers replace and outperform the old system, which consisted of 303 servers that were state-of-the-art in their day… 10 years ago. Each of the new servers has massive power (192 processors) and memory (1 terabyte) that, when all linked together, perform large, complex data analyses incredibly fast. The servers are accompanied by a huge 1.5 petabyte data storage system – that is big enough to store all the movies and shows on Netflix 10 times over – plus a separate backup system to ensure nothing gets lost.
“It is all about supporting the scientists and ensuring they have the resources they need,” Smith says. “You can’t win the Indy 500 without a fast car. We have the Lamborghini of servers now.”
There are about 30 scientists on campus who require this level of computing power to do their work, and another 60 of their collaborators around the world who are granted special, secure permission to use the HPCC.
“Sandy has been extremely dedicated in helping us preserve the confidentiality and security surrounding the Strong Heart Study data, which is the longest running study of heart disease in American Indians,” says Professor Shelley Cole, Ph.D. “She helps us maintain a separate, secure server for the data, which allows us to meet strict security requirements from the National Institutes of Health and our partners, while also providing a resource for approved collaborators to access and use the data.”
You can’t win the Indy 500
without a fast car. We have the Lamborghini of servers now.
Sandy Smith,
HPCC Site Engineer
The HPCC servers are housed in tall, black racks in a special room in the IT building, complete with dedicated air conditioning, ventilated floors, backup power and non-water-based fire suppression systems. Backup power is very important. Jobs running on the servers often include analyzing large genetic datasets that can take anywhere from a few minutes to 30 days to complete. Any power outage or reboot could cause scientists to lose weeks’ worth of work.
“Now with the new generator and backup power system, there is no interruption, not even the slightest blip,” Smith says.
Smith oversees the physical servers and ensures the software on them is running correctly, as well as helps users with any issues. She regularly analyzes how the HPCC will need to expand to keep up with technology and competitors. Part of her work involves installing new data analysis programs onto the servers for scientists. Often, they are open source, which means the software’s code is shared freely and can be modified.
“The challenge is working with open-source programs to make sure they fit into our system and do not break anything else,” Smith says. “With open source, there is no customer service line to call and ask: ‘Hey can you help me with this?’ You’re learning as you go, every day.”
Smith grew up in Lackawanna, New York, a small city on Lake Erie. She enlisted in the Air Force right out of high school, scoring well on the aptitude exams and landing in the intelligence career field. As a Defense Command Communications Countermeasures Specialist, she monitored airwaves for security violations, listening to two conversations at a time, one in each ear, for personnel divulging classified information.
“I can still do that very easily talking to you and listen to the people next to me,” she says.
Later, she was assigned to the Air Force Computer Emergency Response Team, looking for computer vulnerabilities. Another interesting task was when everyone went home for the night, the team would go through offices trying to gain access to computers as if they were the bad guys. A common violation: finding passwords written down under keyboards.
“I met a lot of great people,” Smith says. “There were only 192 people doing what I did in the world, so we all know one another. They are like my family.”
After serving for 10 years, Smith was medically discharged. She became a system administrator at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) – Texas Biomed’s nearby sister institute. She enjoyed working with scientists to develop computer systems for self driving cars and implement computer-based video systems in ambulances to connect physicians with emergency medical technicians.
She joined Texas Biomed in 2010 as a Unix administrator for the genetics department. Unix is an operating system that forgoes the pretty windows and folders that most of us are used to – instead Smith interfaces with a black screen and single command lines to do her work. Now, she is proud to support scientists all across Texas Biomed and their collaborators, including those analyzing preclinical test data about the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine when it was under development.
“If we didn’t have the servers, that testing would have never been done as quick as it was,” she says. “We are frontline.”