Strahinja Trećakov

Computer Scientist & Tennis Enthusiast

About

Strahinja Trećakov

Systems Administrator
New Mexico Consortium
4200 W. Jemez Rd, Suite 301
Los Alamos, NM 87544

Computer M.S. engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Driven nerd for all things cloud, open source, automation, and Linux. Lifelong learner with over 7+ years of delivering automated, and optimized solution systems. Skilled in Linux, VMware Infrastructure, High-Performance Computing, Puppet, Ansible, Kubernetes, AWS, and Jamf. Very positive, hardworking, and competitive ex-division 1 student-athlete with great problem-solving skills. Always looking for new challenges.

Work experience

- HPC System Administrator at NMC – October 2024 – present.
- Enterprise Programmer Analyst at NMSU – May 2022 – August 2025.
- Systems Developer at NMSU – July 2018 – April 2022.
- Research Assistant at NMSU – May 2017 – August 2017.
- Graduate Assistant at IT department at NMSU – January 2017 – May 2018.
- Teacher Assistant in Computer Science at NMSU – January 2017 – December 2017.
- Volunteer Assistant Women`s Tennis Coach at NMSU – January – May 2019.
- Volunteer Assistant Men`s Tennis Coach at NMSU – August 2016 – August 2018.
- Graduate Research Assistant at NMSU – May 2016 – August 2016.
- Undergraduate Research Assistant at NMSU – May 2015 – August 2015.

PROJECTS

Below you can find some of the current and previous projects.

HPC JobQuality

More info coming up soon.

AppEKG

AppEKG is a novel approach to providing better insight into how HPC applications behave in the production environment, an area where further introspection beyond the current practice is strongly needed. Centered on the idea of producing heartbeats from important application phases, AppEKG proposes this unifying idea as a way to support generic analyses that can be used across a wide variety of applications, thus avoiding application-specific issues

Paper

SStack

SStack is a software stack tool to manage package managers. It provides an ease of building common package managers with sane or site-specific defaults in a structural hierarchy. Moreover, using Lmod, we connected all the package managers and software installed using SStack and made them searchable across multiple stacks. This tool helped novice users manage their software stacks without needing extra help from system administrators to deal with package manager installations, dependencies, module configuration, and discoverability across stacks.

Paper

AGGIE-grid

The AGGIE-grid is a decentralized HTC cluster, which was deployed to help maximize the utilization of student lab machines with little or no interference to its regular usage by students.

Paper

Automated Vulnerability Analysis Tool (AVANT)

Developed an Automated Vulnerability Analysis Tool (AVANT), a vulnerability tool that is architecture-agnostic and reports vulnerability found from our test suite. AVANT is used to evaluate the security performance of different architectures. This was primary developed to test our OSFA, however, I made it applicable to other architectures for comparison studies of e.g., reduction of impact, overhead, and performance. AVANT contains source code of traditional memory corruption vulnerabilities in e.g., MITRE CWE list. In addition to the vulnerable source code, AVANT, compiles, runs the analysis and outputs the results. I collected the results and showed that for reported vulnerabilities different architectures may differ in their stack values/addresses which can lead to some other attacks on these architectures.

Paper Poster

Internet of Things

Worked on capturing and analyzing data between IoT devices and smartphone on different setups. Specifically, the August Smart lock, Chromecast, TrackR Bravo, Wink light bulbs and hub, and Monster wireless speaker. After analyzing data captured between smartphone and IoT devices, I found that some of them are sending packed unencrypted.

Common Open Research Emulator(CORE)

Worked on assuring the secure communication between different nodes under spoofing attack, as well as a data forwarding attack. This was done by fixing the software bugs in aodv-uu to make Common Open Research Emulator work better. Moreover, I worked on fixing the implementation of jad-hoc in java and creating and testing topologies.

PUBLICATIONS

- Strahinja Trecakov, Mohammad Al-Tahat, Jonathan Cook; Understanding Job Configuration Impacts on Multiple Views of HPC Job Quality. IPCCC 2025 PDF:

- Mohammad Al-Tahat, Strahinja Trecakov, Jonathan Cook; Machine Learning and AI Classification of HPC Job Quality Using Time-Series Heartbeat Data. IPCCC 2025 PDF:

- Mohammad Al-Tahat, Strahinja Trecakov, Jonathan Cook; Statistical and Shapelet Analysis of HPC Application Performance Using Time-Series Heartbeat Data. IPCCC 2024 PDF:

- Strahinja Trecakov, Nicholas Von Wolff, Mohammad Al-Tahat; SStack: Software Stacks for Easier and Cleaner Software Builds on HPC. HPCSYSPROS@SC 2024 PDF:

- Strahinja Trecakov, Nicholas Von Wolff; AggieGrid: from idle PCs to a distributed High-Throughput Computing system. PEARC 2024: 74:1-74:4 PDF:

- Mohammad Al-Tahat, Strahinja Trecakov, Jonathan Cook. AppEKG: A Simple Unifying View of HPC Applications in Production. PMBS@SC 2022: 129-134 PDF:

- Omar Aaziz, Mohammad Al-Tahat, Strahinja Trecakov, Jonathan Cook; IncProf: Efficient Source-Oriented Phase Identification for Application Behavior Understanding. CLUSTER 2022: 616-625 PDF:

- Strahinja Trecakov, Nicholas Von Wolff; Doing more with less: Growth, improvements, and management of NMSU's computing capabilities. PEARC 2021: 48:1-48:4 PDF:

- Strahinja Trecakov, Casey Tran, Hameed Badawy, Nafiul Siddique, Jaime Acosta, Satyajayant Misra; Can Architecture Design Help Eliminate Some Common Vulnerabilities? MASS 2017: 590-593 PDF:

TENNIS

Over 18 years of experience as a tennis player, including 4 years of college D1 playing experience and over 3 years of coaching experience as a first assistant professional and college assistant coach.

Playing Achievements

- Captain of the New Mexico State University Tennis Team 2015 – 2016.
- Western Athletic Conference Regular Season and Tournament Champions 2015 and 2016.
- Western Athletic Conference First Team All-Tournament 2015(Doubles).
- Ranked top 10 in the Mountain Region 2015(Doubles).
- Western Athletic Conference First Team 2014(Singles).
- Ranked Top 20 in the Mountain Region 2014(Doubles).
- Western Athletic Conference Player of the Week (February 2014).
- Ranked top 5 in Serbia 2007-2011.
- Best junior in Serbia in 2009 and 2010.

Coaching Achievements

- Western Athletic Conference Regular Season Champions 2017 (Men's).
- Western Athletic Conference Tournament Champions 2018 (Men's).
- Western Athletic Conference Tournament Champions 2019 (Women's).
- Chistofer Goncalves - WAC Player of the Year x2, First Team All-WAC Singles x2, First Team All-WAC Doubles, and First Team All-Tournament Singles.
- Stijn de Haan - First and Second Team All-WAC Singles, and Second Team All-WAC Doubles x2.
- Luis Flores - Second Team All-WAC Singles, and First Team All-WAC Doubles.
- Mauri Benitez - First and Second Team All-WAC Singles, Second Team All-WAC Doubles x2, and First Team All-Tournament Singles.
- Enrique Asmar - Second Team All-WAC Singles, Second Team All-WAC Doubles, and First Team All-Tournament Singles and Doubles.
- Sergi Espias - Second Team All-WAC Singles x2, and First Team All-Tournament Singles and Doubles.
- Louis Menard - First Team All-WAC Singles, Second Team All-WAC Doubles, and First Team All-Tournament Singles and Doubles.
- Gavi Kalaga - First Team All-WAC Singles, and First Team All-Tournament Doubles.
- Harsha Challa - Second Team All-WAC Singles, and First Team All-Tournament Doubles.
- Neus Torregrosa - First Team All-Tournament Singles.
- Lindsay Harlas - Second Team All-WAC Doubles, and First Team All-Tournament Doubles.
- Yadira Rubio - Second Team All-WAC Doubles, and First Team All-Tournament Doubles.
- Chloe Gavino - Second Team All-WAC Doubles.
- Rebecca Keijzerwaard - Second Team All-WAC Doubles.