User:Troy Benjegerdes

I grew up on a farm in northern iowa (Manly, IA, to be specific), and in 1993, watched the Iowa State solar car team (and a whole bunch of others) go up highway nine 2 miles from my house, and I decided that was something I wanted to do. When I started my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Iowa State in 1994, I promptly joined the solar car team, and proceeded to learn more about renewable energy and efficiency than in any course.

As an undergrad, I worked for the Department of Energy Ames Laboratory Scalable Computing Lab (http://www.scl.ameslab.gov), and while there, assembled a 32 node cluster of G4 macintosh computers running linux. This was notable at this time because the unix-based MacOS X was still several years from being released, so this was one of the first medium sized cluster using Apple Macintosh hardware.

After graduation, I worked for Terra Soft Solutions, which made the Yellow Dog Linux distribution for PowerPC-based processors (primarily Apple Macintosh machines). Then I spent a year and a half doing embedded systems development for MontaVista software. When a position for system support specialist opened up at the Scalable Computing lab in 2003, I returned to Ames Laboratory and started a PhD program at Iowa State university in Computer Engineering. Unfortunately, due to only being able to take one course a semester, I am still working on said PhD program, which occasionally surprises me when I run into professors younger than I am. Recently, I have left Ames Laboratory due to funding changes, and am currently involved in the start up company Freedom Fertilizer, which brings me back to my agricultural background. This brings together renewable energy (from wind), smart grid (to use wind energy when it's available), and ammonia fertilizer production (from nitrogen in the air, and hydrogen from water electrolysis)