Trenton Horner — HPC Systems Administrator

Role

USF Bellini College

Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing · University of South Florida

HPC Systems Administrator I

Jun 2026 — Present

Since June 2026 I have helped run manage and configure USF's GAIVI, the research computing cluster behind USF's AI, computer vision, and machine learning work.

Most of my time goes to building out GAIVI 3.0, USF's next-generation Slurm compute cluster. It is a ground-up rebuild rather than an incremental upgrade of the existing GAIVI2.0 infrastructure.

Most of my day is split between keeping the GPU cluster running smoothly — user issues, job scheduling, node problems — and the quieter infrastructure work underneath it all like patching, hardening, and networking

Building out GAIVI 3.0 — node provisioning, Slurm control-plane configuration, and scheduling policy.
Architecturing and implementing a stateless OS over network for evert GPU node
Administer the existing GAIVI cluster: job triage, resource allocation, and user onboarding.
Automate routine cluster administration and health checks with Bash, Slurm, and Python.

$ squeue --partition=gpu --format="%.8i %.9P %.10j %.9u %.8T %.12M %.5D %R"
   JOBID PARTITION       NAME      USER    STATE         TIME NODES NODELIST(REASON)
 1204877       gpu   GAIVI2.0   thorner  RUNNING 402-11:37:04    16 gaivi-g[01-16]
 1204878       gpu   GAIVI3.0   thorner  PENDING         0:00    24 (Dependency)

Projects

Cloud LoRa-GPS Tracker Completed

Jan 2026 — May 2026

End-to-end IoT tracking system. A battery-powered ESP32 rover node parses NMEA sentences from a GT-U7 GPS module and broadcasts JSON telemetry over 915 MHz LoRa; a second ESP32 acts as a Wi-Fi gateway, pushing packets into Firebase; a self-contained web dashboard renders live positions on Google Maps. Firebase persistence keeps the last known fix visible even when the hardware loses power.

ESP32 rover node with GPS module and LoRa antenna — Rover node — Heltec ESP32 V3, GT-U7 GPS, 18650 cell.

ESP32 base gateway showing status on its OLED display — Base gateway — catches LoRa packets, uploads to Firebase.

Live tracking dashboard showing both nodes on a map near USF — Dashboard — both nodes live, tracked near USF.

C++ (embedded) · Heltec ESP32 V3 · LoRa 915 MHz · Firebase Realtime Database · Google Maps JS API

SecureNet Intranet Portal Completed

Mar 2026

A small capture-the-flag exercise: a mock intranet login built so the credential check can be defeated by reading the client-side source. Written as a teaching example of why authentication never belongs in the browser.

This site Active

May 2025 — Present

You're here!

Education

Degree: B.S. in Cybersecurity
Institution: University of South Florida
Graduated: May 2026 — GPA 3.85
Awards: Florida Medallion Scholarship · USF Scholars Gold Award
Coursework: Linux CLI, Computer Networks, Information Security

Certifications

Cisco CCNA Apr 2026
CompTIA Security+ ce Mar 2026
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI Foundations Sep 2025
InsightAppSec Certified Specialist Jun 2025

Technical

HPC: Slurm, job scheduling, resource allocation, GPU cluster administration
Systems: Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL, Proxmox VE), Unix, Windows, VMware
Languages: Bash, Python, C, SQL, KQL, HTML, CSS
Security: Splunk, Elastic Stack, Wireshark, Ghidra, access control fundamentals