About me

I am a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Systems Administrator in Research Computing at the Research Technology Office, Arizona State University, where my work centers on high-performance computing for scientific discovery. Driven by a passion for science rooted in my bioinformatics background, I work to accelerate research through system optimization, research software engineering, user collaboration, and community education.

My interests sit at the intersection of research software engineering, the development and optimization of reproducible, standards-based scientific computing pipelines on shared HPC systems, and the benchmarking and tuning of heterogeneous and AI-accelerated architectures. Day to day, I:

• Deploy and optimize Nextflow pipelines on ASU supercomputers, including refactoring genomic sequencing software to modern nf-core standards in support of the Earth BioGenome Project.
• Develop a large-scale virus detection and discovery pipeline as part of the NASA OSDR Microbiome Analysis Working Group.
• Benchmark ASU supercomputers and Intel Gaudi2 accelerators for institutional HPC and AI workloads, and port bioinformatics and protein LLMs and other scientific software to Gaudi2.
• Build benchmarking and post-maintenance testing tooling for heterogeneous clusters, and tune workflow-management systems and scheduling on Slurm-based HPC.
• Maintain the scientific software stacks and bioinformatics databases that support genomics research across the institution, integrate HPC account management with university systems, and customize the Open OnDemand portal to support scientific applications and agentic AI functionality.

Beyond ASU, I contribute to the wider community as a member of the Energy Efficient HPC Working Group, where I analyze HPC power and water usage data, and as a Carpentries Certified Instructor.

Trained as a computational biologist, my earlier research applied explainable machine learning and metagenomic analysis to microbiome and viral genomics. As a Graduate Research Assistant in the Efrem Lim Lab at the ASU Biodesign Institute, I contributed to genomic surveillance pipelines for the Arizona Department of Health Services COVID-19 Sequencing Project, and — in separate work — developed a genomic workflow that identified two novel bat coronaviruses.

I hold an M.S. in Computer Science (Biomedical Informatics) and a B.S. in Computer Science from Arizona State University, and a B.S. in Biology from Wuhan University. My peer-reviewed research has appeared in mSystems, mBio, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, with conference contributions to PEARC, US-RSE, and RMACC.

You can browse my publications, talks, and teaching, or read my full CV. Feel free to reach out at nil.mu@asu.edu.