Troy Benjegerdes earned a degree of Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University in 1999. He has been involved in PowerPC Linux kernel development, sometimes as a hobby, sometimes as a paid job for the past 5 years. He worked at Terra Soft Solutions, and was responsible for the first version of the Black Lab Linux cluster linux distribution for PowerPC machines. He then joined MontaVista Software working on linux kernel bring-up for embedded systems. He is now the lead sysadmin for the Scalable Computing Lab's HPC cluster systems, and is pursuing a master's degree in computer engineering, as well as further research areas in high performance computing.