August 2001

Random Profile: John Clyne

Every other month, Staff Notes Monthly spotlights a stochastically chosen staff member. This month we profile John Clyne, a software engineer in the Visualization and Enabling Technologies Section of SCD.

John Clyne. (Photo by Carlye Calvin.)

An ambition to race:

John's dream when he graduated from CU in 1988 was to become a professional bike racer. Computer programming ranked a distant second in his interests. In fact, the main reason he took a programming job at NCAR was because it was a half-time job—leaving plenty of time for building up endurance. "My first priority was bike racing when I graduated from school," he says. "I raced all over the western states." He still remembers a pre-Olympics trial in 1992 in which his strongest competitor was an intense young man from Texas. "Lance Armstrong," he recalls, "pretty much decimated the field."

What bought him to NCAR?

Bike racing aside, John's route to NCAR took a few unpredictable turns. He was ten when his family moved from New Jersey to Denver. Even though they moved to North Carolina three years later, he always wanted to return to Colorado, which is why he decided to attend school in Boulder. At CU, John planned to concentrate on aerospace engineering, but computer science caught his interest. "I like problem solving, and I like math," he explains. He first came to NCAR for a project in his senior year that involved translating computer graphics metafiles. He helped develop ctrans, an interactive translator that is still in use. "It was purely circumstantial," he says of the events that brought him to NCAR. "It was really no vision on my part."

Racing vs. programming:

John became a full-time programmer in SCD in 1990, and he got a master's in computer science the following year. Although still a dedicated racer, he gradually began to reassess his racing goals. "I was beginning to see that the other racers were advancing much faster than I was. I just looked at the odds of what it took to become professional. There are very few riders who can make it to the top, and I thought the odds were pretty slim." By the time his second daughter was born in 1997, "it was more of a hobby than anything else." Instead, he became increasingly immersed in creating visual representations of climate models.

"The most gratifying thing":

One of John's primary responsibilities is turning large data sets into graphic representations. By showing scientists full-color images or animations of their data, he can help them gain insight into their models. "The most gratifying thing is when scientists tell you that without this [visualization] tool, they never would have understood their data as well." John also takes pride in helping scientists investigate pressing environmental issues, and some of his favorite visualizations show the earth warming dramatically because of global climate change. "They don't have the gee-whiz pictures, but because of the content they're inherently interesting." The viz lab also produces three- dimensional movies that highlight NCAR's modeling work. "We provide scientists and the public alike with a window into NCAR research."

Changing tools:

As computers have become more sophisticated, John has seen major changes in the visualization field. "What you used to do on a half-million dollar supercomputer, you can now do on a $2,000 PC. We have the ability to analyze results for data sets that are much larger than the [ones] we analyzed ten years ago. I do a lot of visualizations now on my desktop." As a result, John is optimistic that more and more scientists will begin to use visualization as a tool to analyze their models. "I think it will become more widely used because of the cost issue. It really opens a lot of doors for the scientific community." He notes, however, that technological companies no longer focus on the needs of scientists and engineers when developing new tools. "All the innovation we see in computer graphics hardware targets the gaming community. If we, the scientific and engineering community, need functionality that isn't of interest to gamers, we simply don't have the numbers to influence the market."

Looking forward to the commute:

While Front Range residents grumble about the worsening rush-hour traffic, John's eyes light up when he talks about his commute. The former racer lives at the base of the Mesa and rides his bike to work. "Biking up the hill every day is one of the things I enjoy most about working at NCAR. I don't have traffic. I just get up and start riding up into the Flatirons."

Spare time:

John's office is filled with pictures of his wife, Andrea, a psychologist with the Boulder Valley School District, and their two daughters—Margot, 6, and Michaela, 4. He enjoys going mountain biking with his family, especially in Winter Park. "I spend a lot of time with my kids. They're a lot of fun."

• DH

Edited by David Hosansky, hosansky@ucar.edu
Prepared for the Web by Jacque Marshall
Last revised: Wed Aug 8 15:59:34 MDT 2001