Cliff Wickman
Retired at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
Summary
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SeniorCliff Wickman is a veteran kernel and systems engineer with 41 years across Cray, SGI and HPE, blending deep low-level engineering with decades as a hands-on instructor in OS internals and performance tuning. He spent the latter part of his career focused on kernel work—memory management, TLB shootdown, large-page support and GPU validation—contributing fixes to projects like numactl and platform-specific boot and BAU stability on SGI UltraViolet systems. Equally comfortable teaching as doing, Cliff split his professional life between training and engineering, translating complex system internals into practical guidance. Now retired and managing a country place in Scandia, MN, he still brings rare institutional knowledge of supercomputing hardware/software interactions and practical embedded-system troubleshooting.
26 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (19)
assembly10
bit-manipulation10
numa10
architecture10
hardware-interface10
memory-management10
linux10
c-programming10
c1110
x8610
c1710
kernel10
system10
sys10
kernel-mode10
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
numactl/numactl
Mar 2008 - Jan 2015
NUMA support for Linux
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:67 commits, 4 PRs, 1 push in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Cliff's primary contribution focused on modifying the `libnuma` library within the `numactl/numactl` repository to utilize variable-length bit masks. This involved changes to the data structures and associated functions like `_getbit`, `_setbit`, and memory allocation/deallocation routines. The changes were aimed at providing NUMA support for Linux. The user also made further modifications to the `numactl` library to allow for cpuset-relative cpu and node numbers, and refactored other programs in the repository to use variable-length bit masks.
numalinux
jonsmirl/mpc5200
Oct 2005 - May 2011
Digispeaker
Role in this project:System Architect / Embedded Systems Engineer
System Architect / Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:57 commits in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Cliff focused on low-level system modifications within the `jonsmirl/mpc5200` repository, primarily involving the SGI UltraViolet (UV) platform. Their contributions centered on addressing boot crashes, fixing memory allocation issues, and optimizing the Broadcast Assist Unit (BAU) functionality. They implemented critical changes related to TLB shootdown mechanisms, memory management, and hardware interactions, significantly impacting the stability and performance of the system. Furthermore, they addressed potential runtime crashes and improved overall hardware interaction by making optimizations for hyperthreaded configurations.
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