Curious Tim

As a child, the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Timothy Carr was fascinated by the inner workings of electronics. He would take apart remote control cars, experiment with the motors, and even build boats using ice cream sticks.

Carr's exploration jumped to a new level in Grade 5, when his mother's new work computer gave him the opportunity to explore programming. But without computing facilities at his Kraaifontein school, he had to find his own way to learn about the field. He quickly fell down the rabbit hole of technology, learning what he could from library books - his only source of knowledge in the days before search engines took off.

Due to financial limitations, he could not go to university, instead he pursued the then-critical Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE) certification, which equipped him for his first role as a lab administrator at UCT.

Climbing the ladder

The university's learning culture allowed him to flourish, attaining additional certifications, including the Novell Certified System Engineer. A year after starting at UCT, he moved to the Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment (EBE), managing their storage and server infrastructure. The role accelerated his journey, marked by a steep learning curve on the technology he was managing.

Structural changes in EBE led Carr to move to Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS), which enabled him to branch out further into lab imaging and, later, systems software, focusing on back-end network infrastructure. It was within ICTS that he developed a passion for open-source software - Linux in particular - where the community's collaborative and developmental nature allowed him to excel even further.

Stepping into HPC

Equipped with his knowledge and experience of Linux, His career developed in 2009 when high-performance computing (HPC) was introduced at UCT. HPC provides high-end computing power to researchers, giving them access to resources that are resilient, reliable, and much more powerful than their standalone machines. For example, an astronomer trying to analyse a picture of the night sky could spread the computational load over hundreds of computer cores, getting the job done far more quickly than they would have by using their own computer.

In an environment where researchers are under time pressure to publish their work, this processing speed is essential. Of course, the more papers they publish, the greater the financial benefit to the university.

[Link] High-performance computing has powered research at UCT for over a decade. Download PDF

And it's not just researchers who can benefit from Carr and his colleagues' expertise. UCT requires immense amounts of data storage for academic and general use, but storage limitations have hit the university in recent years. Therefore, UCT needs to invest in and maintain on-campus storage that is reliable and stable, with differing levels of backup capabilities.

Collaboration and growth

As a senior engineer at ICTS's Enterprise Infrastructure Services, Core Infrastructure Services (CIS) division, Carr is part of a team that looks after UCT's core networking components such as servers, storage, and data centres. He loves working with individuals who are like-minded and considers his colleagues to be family.

"They have your back. When there are issues late at night, there's always somebody on the other side who's able to assist," he said. "I've had researchers phone me up late at night saying that something is not working. They need to get data to a particular university in another country. And it's really a collaborative effort."

Carr also appreciates the freedom to build, and his constant exposure to people who help him to grow.

"There are many opportunities to enrich your career within ICTS. And we have some really smart people in CIS. It's an absolute privilege to work with them. You learn something new every day."

Dealing with challenges

While there are plenty of positives working in the space, his role is not without pressure.

For example, in 2023, he was metres away from a fire suppression gas release incident in the data centre, which was caused by a malfunction of a new air conditioner. The room's fire escape door suffered the consequences, but, fortunately, he was not hurt.

More recently, Carr and his colleagues worked under intense pressure when faced with an urgent request to move researchers' data from overseas to South Africa within a very short timeframe.

A treasury of knowledge

Despite the challenges, he remains upbeat about his work at the university, finding reward in helping researchers run their computations at speeds they didn't know were possible.

"It's quite astounding seeing the look on their faces when their process runs in less than half the time that they actually thought it would," Carr said. "It brings a lot of gratification to our team, as well as the individuals who work with researchers in that space."

In addition, there are always opportunities to learn more from the wealth of highly knowledgeable people within the UCT community.

Timothy Carr was heavily involved in the recently completed refurbishment of UCT's upper campus Data Centre.

"You can easily sit in a tea room at EBE and chat to some of the professors about specific network protocols that are coming about, line speeds for network cards, or anything that is related to the theory of computing. There are A-rated researchers who you can call on for information related to a problem you're working on. These are individuals who have written core documentation on network protocols. They've contributed to the rise of the internet. This is why the university is such a great place to work at: not only can you excel in a career in ICT, but if you run into a problem, you can easily just go down the road and go and ask a question. And that just makes it great."

The ultimate stage for career progress

For those considering a career in the e-Research space, Carr believes an open mind is crucial - especially in a higher education environment:

"You need to look at the entire process - the journey that the university is on. A university is not like a traditional business, which would look at a specific technology stack. The university has many technologies, and there are so many opportunities to move around and work on various systems. So, if you're getting bored in one area, you're welcome to go and move into another area, provided you can add value there."

Looking ahead

With the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) still sweeping through the tech world, Carr is working on a project to enable machine learning for UCT researchers. He sees AI as an exciting development that can augment and simplify the work of professionals.

"As an engineer, eventually you'll have your own staff complement of AI agents that will assist you in trying to produce solutions for your challenges. I see it as an opportunity for us to build awesome stuff with these AI agents and to be able to build and scale systems for our researchers."

As for his own future, Carr loves teaching and would eventually like to move into academia as a teacher and researcher. His recently earned honours in information systems will stand him in good stead, and with his hard work, perseverance, and passion to keep growing, it seems only a matter of time until the boy from Kraaifontein conquers the academic world too.

A glimpse inside UCT's Data Centres with Timothy Carr.