Patrick Dorn is New ESnet Network Engineer

Patrick Dorn

Patrick Dorn has joined ESnet as a network engineer, and will be based in Illinois. His responsibilities within the Network Engineering Group will include configuration and management of ESnet devices, internal tool development, and general network engineering duties.

Dorn has more than a decade of experience working with high performance networking in the research and education community.  He comes to ESnet from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he served in both technical and management roles. As a network engineer he was technical lead for NCSA's heterogenous production network as well as primary WAN architect. His activities ranged from supporting I-Wire, a regional optical network, to designing and implementing a self-service "network activation" system for NCSAnet users. Most recently, Dorn was involved with the IP network planning for NCSA's upcoming Blue Waters supercomputer. As a technical program manager, Dorn supervised NCSA's network engineering staff and conducted project management and prioritization.

“All of my professional experience has the design and support of production networks at its core,” said Dorn. “The different facets of that experience--from campus LAN and WAN to optical networking to software components such as DNS--give me a broad foundation to evaluate new technologies. I'm excited about the ESnet opportunity because it offers challenges of scale along a number of different axes: performance, scope, and complexity.”

A veteran SCinet Committee member, Dorn has served on multiple engineering teams to set up the complex temporary network that supports the SC conference series. As the 2008 SCinet Chair, he led the SCinet effort in Austin, TX. Dorn has also lectured on IP multicast deployment and troubleshooting. A native of Springfield, IL, Dorn received his bachelor of science in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.