About Alastair McKinstry

Alastair is an experienced software engineer and system administrator, based in Galway, Ireland.

He has a B.A. Mod and MSc in Experimental Physics from Trinity College Dublin, working in laser communications. He worked from 1995 - 2001 with Digital Equipment Corporation's High Performance Technical Computing group, where he optimised applications for parallel computing, and developed system administration and performance monitoring tools for Digital (later Compaqs) Alphaserver SC range.

In 2001 he joined 3Com's Silicon Design group, applying this knowledge of performance analysis and system design to the other end of the computing spectrum, i.e., Single System-on-Chip devices. Here he led a small team creating the system and Linux OS software for 3Com's ASIC group.

In 2003 he moved to Oracle as Principal Engineer, working on Unix and Linux ports of Oracle's Database and Applications Server software. Here he was responsible for testing and releasing Oracle's software on high-end systems, including database Clusters on all the clustering systems supported by Oracle and other Unix vendors such as Sun, IBM and Compaq/HP.

From 2004 to 2006 he was a Principal Engineer for Ildana, a Satellite-broadband Service provider. He is an active Linux developer, as a GNOME contributor and Debian project developer. In his work for Parallel Programming Services he specialises in Messaging and Cluster systems.