Over the years, I have worked in the academia, first at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of School of Physics and Astronomy of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of Tel Aviv University, where I also got my Ph.D., then at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Eberly College of Science of the Pennsylvania State University and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Oh, and during my Ph.D. studies I had a wonderful opportunity to spend a bit of time at SISSA in Trieste. 

After I decided to leap from the ivory tower of academic life into the real world, I was fortunate enough to work at Bloomberg, where I was responsible for developing option pricing models and software for the world equity, currency, and commodity markets. After Bloomberg, I spent some time at a couple of pretty interesting startups dealing mostly with networking, and after that I worked for a number of years at the IBM Haifa Research Labs.

What did I do at IBM? My work was mostly related to novel computer system architectures and system software. I was involved in the BlueGene project (more specifically its job management system), operating systems research, virtualization and virtualization management, to some extent in iSCSI and iBOOT (boot over iSCSI), some technologies related to distributed systems and remote storage management, especially in the context of IBM BladeCenter, and some new ideas in computer architecture, e.g., an "IP-Only Server" that has only a single unified I/O channel - the network. I even led an exploratory research project on Collaborative Driving Systems. The project aimed to look at the future of computerized and interconnected intelligent vehicles, road infrastructure, and traffic control systems.

IBM does some really cool stuff. For instance, BlueGene/L used to be officially the fastest supercomputer in the world (see also here) and it is still getting faster all the time!

I also taught Operating Systems at the University of Haifa. I taught a basic OS course to undegraduates and an advanced OS course.

In 2007 I was offered the position of Director of Systems Architecture at Voltaire, where I was until 2009. This was attractive enough (and close to home in Herzlia) to leave both IBM and Haifa U. Voltaire gave me an opportunity to work on some of the most advanced networking technologies in the world, and some of the fastest supercomputers, too. In fact, in November 2007 Top500 listed two Blue Gene systems and two Voltaire systems among the top five. In June 2008 IBM's Roadrunner supplanted Blue Gene as the fastest computer on the face of the planet, breaking the petaflop performance barrier, thanks to Voltaire's InfiniBand switches. Roadrunner is still the record holder. In fact, in the June 2009 Top 500 list Roadrunner and 4 Blue Gene systems occupy 5 spots in the top 10.

In 2009 I went back to the world of finance. This may seem unfashionable with all the screams in the media about how the financial industry is to blame for all the problems - real or perceived - on the face of the planet. Well, the media know neither less nor more on this topic than on any other area of human endeavour, for instance your chosen profession. And the percentage of incompetents is roughly the same in the financial industry as in any other technical field. I was, in fact, longing to get back to finance, the field is very intellectually challenging and rewarding, and the attitude of my friends and colleagues has been very supportive, in some cases with a hint of intellectual jealousy of the fact that I had the background and experience to make the switch.

I am now the Director of Research at a company called PFS TraderTools Inc. The company offers a full complement of liquidity management tools for Foreign Exchange desks of financial institutions, including market data aggregation, order management, dealing platform, smart order routing, pricing engine, etc. "Research" in my title is as remote from any ivory towers as can be: I am in the businerss  strategy division and my job is identifying our customers' business needs and spearheading development of technology that will answer these needs optimally. And yes, this means I do quite a bit of applied research. I am having a lot of fun.

You can look at the list of my publications if you so desire.