He joined the Advanced Computer Systems Team at the Army Research Laboratory (then the Ballistic Research Lab) where he worked on Unix system development, internetworking, and signal and image processing. He was one of the principal authors of the BRL-CAD Package - a large solid modeling and ray tracing analysis system - which has been distributed worldwide.
Mr. Dykstra was active in the ARPA/JDL Initiative in Scalable Computation as the principal investigator on a project involving electromagnetic computations on massively parallel machines.
In 1991 he became the head of the ARL Scientific Visualization Team, which endeavors to extend the state of the art as well as to disseminate visualization technology throughout the laboratory. He also served as the technical leader of a Synthetic Environments project which is exploring the applications of high performance graphics, virtual reality technology, and distributed processing.
From 1994-1999 he headed ARL's Advanced Development Team, which works on leading edge technology in the areas of computer networks, multimedia, filesystems, mass storage, and security. He served as the Army representative for networking on the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), and was the technical coordinator for the ACTS ATM Internetwork (AAI). He was on several working groups of the Federal Networking Council (FNC), co-chaired the Engineering and Operations Working Group, and was the technical lead of a Federal Computer Security Testbed project under the Privacy and Security Working Group. He was co-chair of the Joint Engineering Team (JET) which is coordinating Federal network engineering and collaboration between the Next Generation Internet (NGI) program and Internet2.
In September 1999, he joined WareOnEarth, Inc as Chief Scientist, and is in charge of opening their San Diego office. He continues to work on high performance internet technology, computer security, and the DREN.
Mr. Dykstra has served as Lecturer with the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and as an Instructor of computer science at the University of Delaware.