By Beth Schultz
Network World, 07/23/01
For most of his 42 years, Jeffrey Pound has lived in Dayton,
Ohio, within a few minutes' drive of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Military
aircraft from B-52s to F-16s piercing the skies have been as much a fixture
in his life as hot, humid summers.
So in some respects, the fact that Pound has spent
his entire IT career — 15 years — programming tests,
designing infrastructure, planning network access and plotting
security for the Air Force's premiere research and development
laboratory comes as no surprise. Today, he serves as CTO of the
Air Force Research
Laboratory (AFRL), a $2 billion technology wonderland charged
with developing technologies for future Air Force use.
Pound's work has helped scientists explore every
aspect of the Air Force — its aircraft, pilots, missiles,
defense information systems, space vehicles — you name it.
His work has included writing control programs for tests that
use hydraulics or sound to break aircraft parts, and provisioning
and securing pipes that transport data collected in the AFRL's
seven wind tunnels and many human effectiveness labs.
Ironic for a man who doesn't really like airplanes. But
contrasts define this self-described odd bird nesting among the research scientist
population at the AFRL. "I'm a flaming extrovert in a place full of introverts,"
he says, laughing.
The passions that landed Pound at Wright-Patterson are computers
and engineering. "I've wanted to be an engineer as far back as I can remember,"
Pound says. "My mom even says that when I turned 2, she gave me extension
cords as part of my birthday present, and that I was ecstatic!"
Pound's journey to AFRL CTO began in 1985, during an internship
writing computer programs for the Air Force's Air Vehicles researchers.
"I was working on this multimillion-dollar test. . . . What an incredible
summer!"
After taking a full-time position on June 20, 1988 — nine
days after graduation and five days before getting married — Pound did
down-and-dirty programming for years, then became a computer integration engineer
and, eventually, CIO of the Air Vehicles Directorate, a $100 million organization
now under the AFRL's wing. This prepared him well to become CTO of the AFRL,
one of the highest ranking IT executives on base.
"Some people questioned why I'd go from CIO to CTO, but
more important is that I went from being CIO of a $100 million organization
to CTO of a $2 billion-plus organization. That's a lot more influence,"
Pound says proudly.
From glass to glass
As AFRL CTO, Pound's authority reaches from "glass
to glass — from the fiber the base provides, to the
desktop the user looks at," he says. He provides the computing
environment for AFRL's 5,400 full-time civilian and military workers,
plus another 2,500 to 3,500 contractors and unspecified numbers
of summer interns. Pound says he always builds for 10,000 seats.
Those seats are extremely varied, from computers outfitted
to handle basic office and administrative functions to those with almost Cray-like
computing power crunching colossal volumes of sensitive research data. Such
diversity makes standardizing on a desktop environment difficult. But AFRL
uses Microsoft Office and Windows 2000 widely. And in the fall, Pound will
oversee a large-scale Active Directory pilot.
Beyond the basics, Pound leaves most desktop decisions
to the CTOs at AFRL's 10 technical directorates — Air Vehicles,
Directed Energy, Human Effectiveness, Information, Materials and
Manufacturing, Munitions, Propulsion, Sensors, Space Vehicles
and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. While Pound doesn't
directly oversee these CTOs, he chairs the CTO Council, a team
that deals with technical IT issues for AFRL. The council meets
every two weeks, via videoconferencing for those at the seven
other bases where the AFRL has facilities. In turn, all CTOs advise
their CIOs, who make business decisions based on the input.
User diversity also means Pound needs a full complement
of network connections. A researcher might have a 100M bit/sec
Ethernet link, a Gigabit Ethernet connection or an OC-3 pipe to
the desktop, for example.
To support those varied connections, AFRL uses an ATM mesh
in some spots and an FDDI metropolitan-area network elsewhere. At last count,
Pound says, about 70 Cisco 7000 class routers were in use.
Data leaving the base travels over an OC-12 connection into
the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN). DREN is an AT&T OC-48
ATM cloud connecting the eight AFRL bases and other Department of Defense
sites involved in high-performance computing. As the Air Force's majority
user of DREN, AFRL must make sure the network can securely support the Air
Force's future bandwidth needs, Pound says.
AFRL's Information Directorate alone says it will need in
excess of 2,000 gigaflop years of computing power next year and 23,000 gigaflop
years by 2006, just on the unclassified side. That 2002 figure exceeds the
current capacity requirements of the Air Force as a whole, Pound says.
"We're not talking about the kind of high-speed computing
most people think of as high-performance," Pound says. "We're way, way
out there. Everybody knows the leading edge and that in front of that is the
bleeding edge. But on a lot of things, we're out on the screaming edge."
It all adds up to a cool job, albeit not the highest paid.
But Pound isn't concerned about salary right now.
"I know this sounds hokey," he says, "but I'm
paying Uncle Sam back for being able to live in a country where you can choose
what you want to do, where we can have open conversations."
