Summer 2024
Colin Carta
Colin Carta is a welcome addition to the SPE team since joining nearly two years ago. In that time, Colin has learned testing in the established 100Base-T1 testing area and the very new 1000Base-T1 testing area. In addition to picking up testing burdens quickly and without issue, Colin has thrown himself into any new challenge that presents itself. When asked to learn and assist with APL PCS testing, Colin took his 100BASE-T1 know-how and created an interim logic-analyzer based solution until an FPGA solution would be ready. He also acts as the Product Owner for FPGA PCS tool to ensure the solution meets the needs of our customers. When asked to learn PCB design, Colin threw himself into Altium University and has his first board in production now. When asked to learn HDL for FPGA programming, he took on that challenge as well and the development team (Colin and Yash Patel) has finished their first Verilog module. The list goes on, MATLAB improvements for 1000BASE-T1 automation, refining scripts for controlling our Microchip developed 1000BASE-T1 “Rye Beach” test tool, and more. Colin is responsive to customers, helpful to teammates, and exhibits all the best qualities of an IOL Star as he is thoughtful, considerate, knowledgeable and curious.
For these and numerous other reasons not cited herein, Colin is an exemplary member of the UNH-IOL Team and well deserving of the IOL Star recognition.
John Moss
John has been instrumental in the success of the IOL’s PCB manufacturing capabilities. Over the past year, he has led a team in setting up a manufacturing space from the ground up. This included new equipment, such as the reflow oven and pick and place machine. Being an extremely skilled solderer, John has trained several of his peers on how to build boards and solder various components. With the help of his team, John designed and assembled the duct work for the fume extraction system for the soldering stations. He is always coming up with new ideas to improve how boards are manufactured and how to increase efficiency in the PCB area. Most recently, John began assisting with the administration and sales side of board orders, including laying the groundwork for a start to finish board sales guide. This award is well deserved for all his hard work and dedication to his team and the lab.
Justin Choquette
Justin Choquette’s work and dedication within the Open Source team can only be described as outstanding. His strong work ethic and commitment to quality and customer experience is seen through his efforts to ensure updates and deployments of the LaaS infrastructure keep pace with the team’s planned schedule and are thoroughly tested before and after deployment. If an issue or bug is discovered, Justin always goes above and beyond, not only repairing a bit of code, but also ensuring the bug is completely understood and any larger impact, such as corrupted data or inventories, are also known and repaired. Those efforts have not gone unnoticed by Justin’s team, who all recommended him for this award.
Most recently, Justin’s role in the team has expanded, to include support of the UNH-IOL’s nascent O-RAN activities, requiring Justin to expand his knowledge of networking and tackle the complicated architecture of 5G and radio access networks. Justin has approached those challenges with a positive attitude and willingness to learn and try anything once. Paired with another developer, Justin is also helping to create a new, generalized, results dashboard that will be used in multiple open source projects to organize and share results from continuous integration testing run by the open source team with the external open source communities.
Justin’s hard work, dedication, and commitment to the UNH-IOL, the success of his team, and the open source projects is a testament and credit to his character and receipt of an IOL Star.
Austin Snow
Over the last six months Austin has continued to make extremely meaningful impacts in and out of the IOL that are greatly appreciated by the Datacenter team. Austin has taken a leading role in both NVMe and OCP script development. Helping foster and guide the groups on better development processes, helping standardize code and provide better functionality across each code base while increasing maintainability for future employees. Austin has continually contributed his expertise and insights to all coworkers and managers when they are in need of guidance, correcting scripts, test plan or DUT issues. Austin provided substantial help in the creation and reviewing of NVMe TP22 test plans this spring. Austin’s daily hard work and positive attitude are easy for anyone in lab to see and are worthy of being recognized as an IOL star.
Dan McCarthy
Dan has been with the IPv6 testing team since Summer 2023, starting as a member of the Hightech Bound internship program. Since then, he’s become one of the greatest assets on the team, both in terms of testing efficiency and development chops. Dan was one of the quickest on the team in recent years to become ISO trained for our IPv6 Core, Address Architecture, and IPv6-Only test suites, improving the team’s ability to meet the ever-growing demands for testing under the USGv6 and IPv6 Ready Logo programs. More recently, Dan was tasked with helping to create a bot for tracking information as part of IP’s new incentive program. Dan was able to independently form a team with other folks from IP, create and track a Jira board for the project, write detailed documentation, and create a working bot with his team, all over the course of a single summer. Even while working on this project, Dan was able to keep pace with his testing responsibilities and be a resource for the rest of the team and our new HTB interns in IP at the same time. He’s professional, independent, friendly, and his ability to effectively divide time between development projects and testing make Dan very deserving of an IOL star.
Winter 2024
Evan Stenger
In Evan’s short time at the lab he has already had a significant impact, highlighted by his ability to dive headfirst into the rebirth of the BitPhyer FPGA projects, refreshing these designs to work on supported commercial FPGA platforms, updating our build process and doing so while still acclimating to the diverse needs of the EmBase team. Not to mention working with the high-school interns on day-one. This is just part of the job, as Evan has supported Department of Homeland Security funding to support the development of Resilient PNT (Position/Navigation and Timing) through the draft IEEE P1952 standard and IEEE-SA Conformity Assessment programs. Evan helps the lab by routinely attending the UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express) as we explore the potential of assisting the UCIe community in validating Chiplet interoperability. Evan is a welcome addition to the team, to the lab, and has routinely demonstrated a keen understanding of computing architectures and design - all while being quite approachable and helpful - a welcome addition and newest IOL Star!
John Moss
John is our PCB manufacturing expert. Using the skills he acquired from his service in the military, he has hand soldered countless MIPI boards which generate a revenue of over $250K every year. He has built up an inventory which means customer orders are being fulfilled much quicker, the same day in some cases. Able to balance multiple priorities, John has passed on his soldering skills to many of his peers while still keeping up with the production of boards. He is leading the effort to create a PCB manufacturing space in the GTP, using his past experience to advocate for the tools and layout which will increase efficiency and speed for building boards. John is often seen at the lab early in the morning sitting at the soldering station working on a board. He regularly exceeds his incentive hours and has a high rate of productivity. He is very deserving of being recognized as an IOL Star.
Adam Hassick
Adam is an exceptionally skilled developer who is great at not only picking up new responsibilities that are requested of him by managers or community members, but also reaching out to the community and being a front-runner in updating and improving major project-wide processes to benefit both our lab and everyone who uses the project. His work in the open source team spans multiple internal and external projects, where his code submissions and reviews have helped improve both our internal tools and the community’s tools. Adam has become a recognizable member of the DPDK and LF Edge Open Horizon communities, where he’s contributed to the CI and devops components of both projects, and even helped start discussion with the other open source project teams developing the tools used by those projects, such as Patchwork. Adam is a driven and hard working member of the Open Source Team, juggling development for new features and processes, while keeping up with community meetings, code maintenance, and day to day laboratory tasks. He has grown into an exceptional developer, team member, and leader and he is more than deserving of this award.
Jeremy Spewock
Jeremy Spewock is a great teammate and leader on the Open Source Team, always producing high quality code in good time, readily providing guidance to more junior members of the team, and always clearly communicating his status with others. I think his unusually verbose “end of day” updates on Google Chat may become the stuff of Open Source Team legend in years to come! Although his internal development work for our OFA cluster, Ansible playbooks, and DPDK CI scripts remains as strong as ever, he has taken another big step up in working closely with external developers in order to build the DPDK Test Suite (DTS) framework. Jeremy has single handedly driven the development of core components on the project such as the remote session handler, but also has also submitted testsuite smoke tests, and the projects first DPDK ethernet device test in recent months. He has proven his effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile not only to the team here, but to members of various open source communities who have come to know and rely on Jeremy. Thank you Jeremy.
Michael Baczewski
Mike's main role at the IOL is shipping, however, he is also the go-to person for varying tasks including: building equipment, disposal of devices, maintaining inventory, stabilizing tables etc. Mike is one of the first to help out when something needs to be done immediately. He’s one of the first people in every morning and gets the coffee started for everyone else. Mike has become our shipping guru. No matter when the package is going, and when and how it is supposed to get there, Mike will make it happen. Even if he has to drop it off himself! He is also instrumental in databasing incoming equipment, making sure that all data is recorded accurately and consistently. This helps to free up time for everyone else to do other tasks. A great resource like Mike should not be taken for granted and we are pleased to recognize him as a recipient for a 2024 IOL Star.
