Hosted on my Kubernetes homelab GitHub Actions → GHCR → Argo CD → Kubernetes

Linux / Infrastructure / HPC

Tolga Bilgis

I’m a Computer Engineering student at Clemson. I administer our student HPC cluster, spent a summer building infrastructure at Los Alamos, and run the Kubernetes homelab serving this page.

Seeking Summer 2027 internships · Clemson, SC

My three Lenovo ThinkCentre homelab nodes below a monitor displaying Grafana.
The hardware behind this pageHow it runs ↗

01 / Experience

Experience

HPC Intern · AI Infrastructure

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Built a 10-node stateless HPC cluster with Slurm, automated provisioning with cloud-init and Ansible, and added GitLab CI/CD builds for boot images.

For a retrieval system serving 2 TB of scientific PDFs, I benchmarked five vector databases on 2.7 million embeddings. The selected backend delivered 20× the previous solution’s throughput in that workload.

Research poster accepted for presentation at SC26.

Research poster comparing vector database throughput, latency, precision, and scalability for the Genesis Mission.
Research posterBenchmarking AI Vector Databases for Genesis Mission ↗

Comparison of five vector databases using 2.7 million embeddings, with baseline, quantized, and tuned configurations.

Download poster (PDF) ↓
  • Linux
  • Slurm
  • Ansible
  • cloud-init
  • GitLab CI/CD

HPC System Administrator

Clemson University

I co-built and administer our student team’s cluster with eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs. My work includes configuring distributed workloads, investigating scaling bottlenecks, and tuning performance.

Competed at SC25 and co-authored our reproducibility paper, including an evaluation of distributed graph algorithms across three nodes. Returning for SC26. I also built a 16-node Raspberry Pi cluster for the Single Board Cluster Competition.

  • Rocky Linux
  • Slurm
  • MPI
  • NVIDIA A100
Clemson's student cluster team at the SC25 competition booth.
The team at SC25 · St. Louis
Clemson teammates working on laptops beside the cluster during SC25.
At work during the competition
More from SC25 on LinkedIn ↗

Earlier work

Outlier AI · AI Coding / Math Expert Jan 2024 – Jan 2026

Evaluated code and mathematical reasoning; wrote and tested reference solutions.

Clemson University · Undergraduate Robotics Researcher Aug – Dec 2024

Integrated sensors in Python and C++ and built a real-time vehicle telemetry dashboard.

02 / Projects

Projects

Networking / C

NetProbe

View source ↗

A TCP client/server tool for measuring round-trip latency and sending throughput. It reports p95/p99 latency and handles partial transfers and interrupted socket calls.

  • C
  • POSIX sockets
  • Linux

CUHackit / February 2026

Distributed edge AI

View source ↗

Built a theft detection system across two NVIDIA Jetsons in 24 hours. We split object detection and facial recognition between devices and sent alerts to a web dashboard, with GPU inference running in Docker.

2nd Place, Best Use of Hardware · CUHackit 2026

  • Python
  • NVIDIA Jetson
  • Docker
  • YOLO
Preview of the CUHackit edge AI demonstration.CUHackit project demoWatch the CUHackit demo on LinkedIn ↗

Also: term3d, a terminal 3D renderer in C ↗

03 / About

About me

Tolga BilgisPortrait coming soon

I’m studying Computer Engineering at Clemson, with a minor in Mathematical Sciences. I expect to graduate in May 2028; my current GPA is 3.9/4.0.

I’m interested in SRE, systems administration, platform engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, and HPC. The work I enjoy most is getting Linux machines configured, understanding how they communicate, and figuring out why a workload isn’t behaving as expected.

Find me on LinkedIn ↗

Technical skills

Systems & networking
Linux, systemd, TCP/IP, DNS, SSH, NFS, InfiniBand/RDMA
Automation & delivery
Ansible, cloud-init, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD
Containers & monitoring
Kubernetes, Docker, Podman, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana
HPC & programming
Slurm, MPI, OpenMP, Python, Bash, C, C++
Full skills and experience ↗

Summer 2027 internships

Contact

Seeking Summer 2027 internships in systems administration, SRE, platform engineering, DevOps, and HPC.