Jason Stowe CEO, Cycle Computing

What does your job entail?

I'm the CEO of Cycle Computing, a five-year-old software vendor that provides high-performance, high-throughput, and green computing solutions. We work with some of the largest firms to increase utilization of their compute infrastructure, running production calculations on desktops, servers, virtual machines (VMs), and in clouds, like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

What IT projects are you currently working on?

We do a lot of work helping companies run high-throughput calculations internally and in the cloud. We help harvest compute cycles using Condor, an open-source resource manager. Last year, we helped one of our clients manage and harvest unused compute capacity on 30,000 cores to save millions of dollars in new servers, and 2,000 square feet of datacenter space. This year, we will take that a step further using new green computing features to hibernate servers and desktops when there are no jobs to run, and power them up when they are needed for calculations. This, combined with our software's management, monitoring, and reporting capabilities will potentially save millions in energy costs.

What will be the big trend(s) of 2010?

Demand for compute capacity for applications like back-testing, hedging simulation and pricing is increasing, but budgets, especially for capital equipment, aren't. So in 2010, we see more focus on trying to maximize the utilization/efficiency of existing infrastructure, and using cloud providers for high-performance computing (HPC) capacity.

Will you hire new IT recruits next year? If so, how many? What skills are you looking for?

Absolutely. We look for three things in new employees: that they are smart, honest, and get things done. We don't get hung up on which languages developers know; we care more about their ability to learn and solve problems while creating scalable/maintainable systems.

Which portion of your job occupies the most of your time?

Corresponding and working with clients occupies most of my time. We spend considerable effort understanding what customers need and utilizing our engineers to build practical, well-thought-out solutions that can be applied in many industries. Or in Office Space parlance: "I take the specs from the customers to the engineers. I'm a people person!"

What keeps you awake at night?

My inbox.