Mark Nelson
Founder at Species83
North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Nelson is a seasoned distributed storage and HPC engineer with 14+ years of experience building and optimizing large-scale systems, currently serving as a Board Member of the Ceph Foundation and Co-Founder/Chief Architect at Clyso. He specializes in performance tuning across Ceph, BlueStore, RocksDB and container/cloud environments, from micro-optimizations and cache age binning to system-wide behavior analysis and benchmarking. At Red Hat he delivered notable wins like LRU cache refactors yielding ~30% gains and a high-speed wallclock profiler for remote unwinding, and he continues to lead Ceph community performance efforts. An active open-source contributor, his Ceph work spans core backend improvements and benchmarking tools that directly impact real-world storage deployments. Based in North Vancouver, he also explores homelab hardware platforms through his Species83 venture, blending practical hardware builds with software performance research. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, measurable improvements that bridge low-level code and production-scale architecture.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at University of Minnesota
Github Skills (23)
benchmark10
c-language10
python10
back-end-development10
rocksdb10
benchmarking10
distributed-systems10
c1110
c1710
data-storage10
object-store10
ceph10
distributed-file-system10
cprogramming-language10
testing9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
ceph/cbt
Feb 2013 - Feb 2022
The Ceph Benchmarking Tool
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 5 reviews, 281 commits in 9 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Mark primarily contributed to the Ceph Benchmarking Tool, focusing on the underlying infrastructure and tests. Their work involved adding new benchmark tests, specifically the `rbdfio` tests, which were later repurposed for QEMU/KVM. They also enhanced existing functionalities by adding options to allow for the use of existing clusters, incorporating advanced features like erasure coding, and providing improved cleaning and monitoring capabilities. Furthermore, they added support for setting OSD parameters and for different pool configurations.
benchmarkbenchmarkingceph
ceph/ceph
Mar 2012 - Nov 2022
Ceph is a distributed object, block, and file storage platform
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:138 reviews, 136 commits, 124 PRs in 10 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Mark contributed to the Ceph distributed storage platform by implementing and optimizing core backend components. Their work involved enhancing the MDS (Metadata Server) by optimizing subtree checks within the `CInode` module and improving the `BlueStore` component through the addition of an onode column family and implementing cache age binning. Further contributions include adding missing operations to cyanstore and setting up column family options for rocksdb. These changes likely aim to improve performance, stability, and feature sets within the Ceph storage system.
fusefile-storagecephstorageopenebs
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