Providentia Worldwide  is an exciting new consulting firm formed by Ryan Quick and Arno Kolster.

Arno Kolster was born in The Netherlands and grew up in Canada where he received a degree in Computer Science from The University of Calgary. 
 
His almost 30 year career in Information Technologies has encompassed a wide range of industries including oil and gas, law enforcement and emergency services, a public utility, a number of internet startups, e-commerce and internet payments.
 
His primary career focus has always been around data, database administration, and database architecture in the enterprise.  He has extensive knowledge of relational databases, NoSQL data stores and graph databases. In the past six years with the advent of larger data sets, an interest in HPC and technical computing came about as a result of finding solutions to solving real time data analytics across distributed systems at web scale.
 
This blend of HPC and enterprise archictures has peaked the interest of many in the HPC community, allowing Arno to speak both domestically and internationally on the HPC work he’s done and how he sees future integration of HPC in the enterprise.
 
Arno and Ryan won the prestiguous IDC HPC Innovation Award at Super Computing 2012 and 2014  The award was presented for their work in blending enterprise and HPC architectures for fraud detection and utilizing DSPs for real time streaming analytics.  They have hosted Birds of a Feather sessions  at both SC and ISC on a variety of HPC and enterprise topics.
 
Arno was also the recipient of the Alan El Faye HPC  Inspiration Award at the 2016 Enterprise HPC Award banquet.
 
He currently holds a seat on the HPC User Forum Steering Committee, the Enterprise HPC and Leverage Big Data Advisory Board and the HPE Vertica Client Advisory Board. The latter is HPE’s Enterprise Big Data Analytics platform which is a highly scalable distributed columnar store database.
 
In his spare time, Arno has many hobbies, including philately.  He is a member of the Royal Philatelic Society Of London, The Collector’s Club Of New York and San Francisco and The American Philatelic Society.  His other interests include music, both recorded and live, watching films and art.
 
Location: San Francisco, CA

 

S. Ryan Quick

Ryan Quick has experience in blockchain, academia, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and government. Most recently, he has focused on audits and implementation design for some of the most prevalent blockchains in the world. At Providentia Worldwide, his experience includes a wide variety of strategic and technical implementations for complex distributed systems, messaging middleware, product-fit design and testing, and high performance computing. He headed the PayPal Advanced Technology Group -- responsible for PayPal's high performance computing environments and their specialized computing services and configurations for optimized computational workloads. At eBay, he designed and implemented some of the first high performance and highly available hyperscale systems in the industry.

Ryan is an expert at scale-out systems, UNIX kernel design and profiling, and has been recognized for innovation in hardware and application design, and in messaging ontology and distributed event-driven systems.  His current efforts bring blockchain, machine learning, real-time streaming, set-selection, and digital signal processing technologies to bear on predictive analytics to provide self-healing for command and control systems.

Ryan received degrees in English and Philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and went on to study American Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School.  His lifelong hobby of working with computers provided a means to support himself through college and he has been a part of the Internet and Linux communities since the early 1990s. He focused on distributed systems for the last 25 years, with special attention to the interaction between applications, operating systems, and the hardware and networks underlying them.

Ryan holds patents for blockchain implementations, messaging middleware systems, and is a pioneer in bridging High-Performance Computing technologies with enterprise best-practice infrastructure. His most recent work in leveraging HPC concepts for real-time analytics with his colleague Arno Kolster have garnered provisional patents, IDC HPC Innovation awards (SC12, SC14), and HPCWire Reader’s Choice awards.

He credits his liberal arts background with his unique (and sometimes controversial) approach to distributed computing systems, recognizing that there are many ways to solve problems and that malleability in design and approach sharpen the final implementation.  Liberal arts problem-solving encourages reaching far afield for inspiration--a skill he considers invaluable for cutting-edge computer engineering. His past technical experience in health care, higher education, network security, e-commerce, and finance provide a breadth of industry experience and perspective to a variety of problems.

Ryan can be found fishing and birding in good weather, and playing hobby board games when it’s not. As an active Mormon, he spends much time in his responsibilities for religious education in his local congregation.  He has lectured on subjects as varied as database sharding, stream analytics, world religions, and Judeo-Christian hagiography for universities, conferences, and religious institutions.

Location: Washington, DC