ICDS News

Staff Spotlight: Eric Huyett

Each month, the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) recognizes one staff member that has contributed outstanding work to our team. Eric Huyett, R&D engineer, is being acknowledged for working at ICDS for over 10 years in various roles to maintain our HPC cluster. 

Huyett helps administration with the cluster, but also does networking, storage and general Linux administration. His work also includes verifying that data was transferred completely and sorted properly. 

“When I first started at Penn State, I worked on the HPC system under a group called RCC, before ICDS was ICDS,” Huyett said. “With HPC, there is specialized storage and lots of networking. I help maintain that so that the cluster stays up and running. As we have evolved, we have added new things. There’s a lot of troubleshooting too. We want to make sure that the cluster is happy and healthy.” 

Each year, the HPC system has five scheduled outages for updates that are scheduled for 24 to 48 hours. Huyett and others work to ensure the system is back up and running before the outage period is complete.  

“There’s a lot of people that help with outages. Everyone has their tasks,” Huyett said. “I think we have a good team here. We work together to solve problems and try to keep on top of things. There are several projects going on.” 

Over the years, Huyett has gained a lot of experience and knowledge. He has started to take time to mentor younger employees.  

“When I started, I was one of the least experienced and now I am one of the most experienced,” Huyett said. “I am in a leadership role, and I am more involved in leading the outages and am involved in the decision-making process for the pursuit for new storage. I’m talking with vendors more than I did and helping with those decisions.” 

Huyett has spent time learning about vendors and what researcher’s needs are and how they can be met. He has worked to transfer principal investigator (PI) data to new systems and following through to make sure that researchers could access their data. 

Standing up Roar Collab was one of the largest projects Huyett had a hand in.  

“The system was designed from the ground up so that we could fix some problems we thought we had with the old system,” Huyett said. “It’s running great and smoothly and has helped with our outages. I dealt with the transitioning of the storage, both active and archived, to the new system. It took a lot of time and coordination with the PIs.” 

More recently, Huyett has worked with the team to revamp the 1E system for restricted users – those who only have restricted data. Huyett and the team used similar tools to build this system from scratch. Huyett’s focus on this project was also the transitioning of storage to the new system. 

“We stood up a new system that was rolled out recently using lessons learned from Roar Collab,” Huyett said. “We want to have the best HPC system that we can because if it’s up and running well and doing its job, then the research can be done.” 

While Huyett is very dedicated to his work, he is also committed to his family. 

Huyett and his family spend a lot of time together, but their favorite hobby is geocaching. 

“It first started when my kids were in elementary school and on family vacations,” Huyett said. “We decided it was a good family activity. It got the kids out and about to do things together. While they’ve kind of grown up and moved onto doing some of their own things, I still geocache. We would geocache on vacations as a family and now our vacations are based on it.” 

Huyett also really enjoys playing disc golf in his free time.

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