Ian Cottam

(last updated November 2011)

 

Dec 2010 — present:
Research Computing Evangelist
& Infrastructure Support

Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences,
IT Services for Research,
The University of Manchester

I support the Condor High Throughput Computing service as well as other aspects of research computing support for the Faculty. Condor, at Manchester, has grown over the last few years from its early days just in MIB on 100 PCs to some 2500 processor cores on mainly Teaching Cluster machines. During 2011 we have provided researchers with over 4 million accumulated compute hours. Currently, our largest user is a Computer Science postgrad (Prof. Steve Furber’s research group) who in just 3 months has accumulated 122 compute years of research results.

 The EPS Faculty Condor facility is also an interesting development in that it was largely a skunkworks project with an informal team and was, and is, completely user-driven.

 I am the co-designer and co-author of the content of EPS Condor’s extensive web site.

 One of my innovations (adopted nationally by the UK’s Grid Service) is a drag-and-drop interface to Condor that saves users from having to learn and then use the Linux terminal command line. I named this, more user-friendly, interface: DropAndCompute.

 

Dec 2007 — Dec 2010: IT Manager

Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre & the School of Materials & the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Sciences,
The University of Manchester

All aspects of Faculty IT Management

 

Nov 2005 — end Nov 2007: IT Manager

MIB (Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre), The University of Manchester

Again, this post covered all aspects of Faculty IT Management (albeit on a relatively small scale), and with the exception of teaching support.

 

Mar 2003 — end Oct 2005: Senior Research Fellow

Manchester Business School

-        I worked with Coventry City Council to transform their services in line with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s e-Government agenda.

-        I undertook a Best Value Review of Information and Communications Technology for Salford City Council. This work is published as “Excellence in ICT” (N.B. large document, slow download). The review concentrated on strategic issues and examined eight local authorities plus three commercial organisations.

-        I was a co-author of SPRINT’s “The Management of Change”. SPRINT is a Business Process Re-engineering method, well known in the public sector.

-        I designed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) “Maturity Model” as part of the UK government’s CRM National Programme, and managed its implementation as a software tool by staff of Salford City Council.

-        I was a co-author of the influential “CRM Scan” report to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the CRM National Programme community.                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                            

Sept 2000 — Feb 2003:
Vice President, Software Engineering

Transitive Ltd. (N.B. now redirects to IBM)

A University of Manchester spin-out company

-        I was employee number 1 at Transitive’s launch in 2000, and helped the company grow to approximately 50 staff, comprising some 45 software engineers in Manchester, with an executive and marketing team in California. I brought-in and started the company quality and process cultures.

-        Transitives’s product QuickTransit (called Rosetta by Apple) is a dynamic binary translator and has enabled Apple to switch (from IBM’s to Intel’s) processor family seamlessly. Rosetta has only recently (with the release of OS X Lion in Autumn 2011) been discontinued by Apple. Transitive is now part of IBM.

 

During the period below I was also occupied with several visits to Silicon Valley to acquire venture capital investment to help kick start Transitive with offices and engineering staff.                                                                                  

 

July 1999 — Aug 2000:
Consultant in highly dependable systems

Manager of a large group producing two components for EuroFighter at BAe Systems.
For Tessella, I was manager and one of the two developers of a Train Management System for a UK railway company.   

                                                                                                                                                                                            

1998 — June 1999: Principal Software Engineer

Alstom Signalling Ltd

I worked on models and system development for European railway transmission-based signalling systems. 

                                                                                                                             

1994 — 1998: Senior Consultant

Adelard.

-        Manager for the Dust-Expert project: a development for the Health and Safety Executive of a safety-related, knowledge-based application to advise on the construction of vessels containing potentially explosive dusts. This involved close collaboration over two years with government scientists who had developed the necessary theories. This is believed to be the world’s first “shrink-wrapped” application on general sale that carries a guarantee of safety with respect to the international definition (IEC 61508).

-        Independent Safety Assessor (software) for MoD radar tracking system developments.

-        Produced Market Survey on Requirements Engineering for safety-related systems for the EU-funded REAIMS project.

-        Produced Project Manager’s Guide to Programming Languages for the Ministry of Defence.

-        Developed Civil Aviation Authority specification for the selection and use of programming languages for safety-related systems.

-        Produced Software Assessment Manual (based on IEC 61508) for Factory Mutual Inc. of Boston USA, and provided on-site consultancy and training in its application.

-        Provided training in formal language processing tools for Peek Traffic Ltd.

-        Produced and taught formal methods training course for BNFL.

-        Produced Applications’ Review, Generic Architecture, Interface Analysis, Demonstrator Requirements and contributed to formal model, reviews and final report for the Health and Safety Executive’s Project on Nuclear Waste Tracking.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                     

1988 — 1994: Director of the Post-experience Vocational Education (PEVE) IT Unit

Department of Computer Science

University of Manchester

I managed training and support staff and developed numerous courses for industry-based students, as well as designing and managing two modular masters degrees. During this period I also managed and undertook a number of R&D projects with industry including a large DTI funded project with ICL.

-        Adviser for the implementation of a support environment for ICL Corporate Servers Division.

-        Reviewed the formal definition of the SPARK Ada subset for the Ministry of Defence.

-        Developed a program directly from its formal specification and proved its correctness (using the SPARK toolset from Praxis Critical Systems) for BNFL.

-        Designed and implemented a “safer” subset of the C programming language, known as idC. This subset was designed for teaching good practice and also for the implementation of critical systems.              

                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                                                                            

1981 — 1988:
Lecturer (Formal Methods of Software Engineering)

Department of Computer Science

University of Manchester

Among other (teaching and research) duties, I co-managed research staff implementing the Manchester University Logical Environment and the UK government’s Alvey programme’s Integrated Project Support Environment 2.5.

                                                                                                                                                                                            

1978 — 1980: Research Assistant

Department of Computer Science

University of York.

I co-developed a compiler for the experimental language Modula, and conducted general research into secure, real-time programming. I was also a consultant to Ford Aerospace Corp. of Palo Alto, USA, on their use of the York Modula compiler for a secure and dependable UNIX kernel project. 

                                                                                                                             

1976 — 1978: Software Quality Assurance Manager

I started the Software Quality Assurance facility at NCR Laboratories, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

 

1974 — 1976: Senior Software Engineer

Plessey Telecommunications Research

I implemented the Plessey System 250 operating system generation tools (basically, an assembler). I also implemented the secure, separate compilation and library system for Plessey’s CORAL programming language compiler.              

                                                                                                                                                                                            

1972 — 1974: Programmer and system support

Liverpool Polytechnic Computer Services.

I supported an ICL mainframe service to academics and students. I also worked briefly with Liverpool University on operating system tools and a compiler project.                                                                                      

 

Publications (include):

                                                                                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, P Kawalek, N de Noronha, Excellence in ICT in Local Government, (N.B. large document, slow download), MBS, 2005.    

                                                                                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, P Kawalek, D Shaw, A Local Government CRM Maturity Model: a component in the transformational change of UK councils, Proceedings of the Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, New York, 2004.

                                                                                                                                                                                                     

D Shaw, P Kawalek, I Cottam, Y Temren, M Cahill, M Willetts, Change Management – Core, National CRM Board, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2004.                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                             

D Shaw, P Kawalek, L Batista, I Cottam, Baseline environmental scan and analysis of good practice in CRM by local authorities, National CRM Board, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2003.                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                             

T Clement, I Cottam, P Froome, C Jones, The Development of a Commercial Shrink-Wrapped Application to Safety Integrity Level 2: The DUST-EXPERT Story. In Computer Safety, Reliability and Security (Proceedings of Safecomp ’99), Massimo Felici, Karama Kanoun and Alberto Pasquini (eds), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1698, Springer 1999. ISBN 3-540-66488-2.

                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, The Birth of the Baby: the first stored-program computer 1948-1998, University of Manchester. 1998.     

 

I Cottam, Project Managers Summary Guide to Software Languages, Sea Systems Publications SSCP82, Procurement Executive MoD, 1995.                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, W Neary, P Vlissidis, A Case Study Evaluation of the Vienna Development Method Specification Language: VDM-SL, BNFL Report, 1993.                                                                                                                      

I Cottam, idC: A Subset of Standard C, University of Manchester, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report, UMCS–92–12–3, 1992.                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                             

Book:

J Latham, V Bush, I Cottam, The Programming Process, Addison Wesley, International Computer Science Series, 1990.    

                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, C Jones, T  Nipkow, A Wills, M Wolczko, A  Yaghi, A Project Support Environment for Formal Methods, in J  McDermid (ed.), Integrated Project Support Environments, Peter Peregrinus, pp  32–53, 1985.                      

                                                                                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, Extending Pascal with One–entry / Multi–exit Procedures, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol.20, No. 2, February 1985.

                                                                                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, The Rigorous Development of a System Version Control Program, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE–10, No. 2, March 1984.      

 

R Ibbett, I Cottam and R Zobel, Revisions to Examination Syllabuses, BCS Computer Bulletin, Sept. 1983.                

                                                                                                                             

I Cottam, C Jones, T Nipkow, A Wills, Mule: A support system for formal specification and rigorous software development, Proceedings of the BCS-FACS/SERC Conference on Program Specification and Verification, University of York, UK, March 1983.