Data Platform Engineering Lead
Mr. Rath has been leading the Systems Infrastructure Team at the JGI since 2020. Before joining the JGI, he has been working on the boundary of life science and computational science with notable stops at NERSC, IMBA (Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Vienna) and the High Field MRI Centre in Vienna, where he first stumbled from software development into building productive infrastructure in close collaboration with the local scientists.
As the lead of the infrastructure team and the chair of the Cluster Advisory Group (CAG), he sees his role as using the substrate provided by LBNL, where possible, and enriching it, where necessary, to fit the needs of the dynamic environment that is JGI. Infrastructure built by his team is unbureaucratic and driven by code, without putting humans in the loop. He is a big proponent of empowering people and transparency and a staunch supporter of open source development processes. This expresses itself in the open approach JGI compute infrastructure is managed, through the Cluster Advisory Group composed of representatives from JGI’s science and production sequencing programs.
