I am Protik Das. I am working as Senior HPC Solutions Engineer at KLA Corporation. Our team designs air-gapped HPC systems for deep learning applications, the keyword being “air-gapped”.

Before rejoining KLA I worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as Systems Development Engineer (SysDE) and at SambaNova as Senior Systems Engineer. At AWS my team owned all OEM drives across the AWS infrastructure. At SambaNova I worked on improving the automation around the manufacturing process of the DataScale system.

At KLA we design air-gapped HPC systems for deep learning applications, the keyword being “air-gapped”. We take inspirations from tools and technologies designed for cloud systems a lot. Often use them as is. Using tools designed for cloud systems on an air-gapped systems have some unique challenges. At KLA I build custom Linux OS golden images, write infrastructure automation code, design hardware systems, work on troubleshooting of existing systems, support customer escalations, and more.

I did my PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Riverside under the supervision of Dr. Roger Lake. My research was on theoretical material science which was funded by the semiconductor industry. I looked at a new generation of layered materials, more commonly known as 2D materials as a potential candidate for semiconductor industry. I interned at Army Research Laboratory where I formalized a tool I wrote to streamline density functional theory calculations. I also interned at Exabyte (now Mat3ra) where I did bandstructure calculations on 1,000 (well almost) binary compound materials using public cloud in a relatively short period of time. If you are curious about my research, my Google scholar page can be a good start.

I can be reached at LinkedIn. My GitHub profile has some tinkerer projects I worked on sporadically.

This website is built using Jekyll and the skeleton is cloned from website of Nick Craver, Software Imagineering. If you are into optimizing things, I got a treat for you: Optimization Considerations: Measure at the Browser. This is a fascinating read about how Nick optimized his website.