Sam Trahan

I am a High Performance Computing (HPC) software engineer, atmospheric physics researcher, and hobbyist dessert artist who works for the US government's Environmental Modeling Center, helping in the development of its supercomputer models of the weather and environment. We create supercomputer software that produces data about of possible weather events days or weeks in advance. It does this by assimilating into a model millions of observations of the earth every day, executing massive fluid dynamics simulations, and compressing the information down to graphs custom-designed for forecasting the weather. Human forecasters use this data to guide their judgment of weather events, as they prepare forecasts for the public.

This kind of work requires a wide breadth of knowledge, including earth science, software engineering, and low-level hardware. You have to know how to squeeze every bit of performance you can out of the supercomputer without sacrificing the quality of the model forecast. I specialize in solving tasks that require extensive scientific software development; software engineering tasks that lie on the border of earth sciences and computer science. One must understand the phenomenon being modeled, the model, and the hardware in order to fully appreciate the scope of the problem and come up with ideal solutions.

While I do have gainful employment, I am interested in other job openings. Should you be interested, my resume is on this website at sam-trahan-resume.pdf.

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