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David A. Lifka
Director - Center for Advanced Computing
Director - Research Computing, Weill Cornell Medical College
Adjunct Associate Professor - Computing and Information Science

David is the Director of the Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing and the Director of Research Computing at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is an HPC industry veteran with twenty years of experience in management and technology leadership positions at Cornell and Argonne National Laboratory. He has been the Vice-Chair for the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing since 2011. His areas of expertise include sustainable models for academic research computing facilities, parallel job scheduling and resource management systems, data management, high throughput systems, Web services, and cloud computing. Lifka has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and serves on a number of academic and corporate advisory boards. His scheduling technologies have been commercially licensed and he has received a ComputerWorld/Smithsonian award for innovations in IT. Lifka was recently named Coordinator of Architecture and Design for “XSEDE,” the National Science Foundation’s five-year program providing advanced cyberinfrastructure systems and services to US scientists and engineers.

Email or Phone 607.254.8621

Curriculum Vitae

Areas of Research or Expertise

• Sustainable business models for academic research computing facilities
• High Performance Computing
• Research data analysis
• Research data management from aquistion to long term archival
• Parallel job scheduling & resource management systems
• Scripting in Python & Perl

Projects

• SC 2010 Tutorial: Running Parallel Simulations and Enabling Science Gateways with the NSF MATLAB Experimental Computing Resource at Cornell
• NSF STCI Grant 0844032: A TeraGrid MATLAB Cluster - Exploring New Services for an XD Future
• Data Analysis and Technology Insertion for NSF Funded TACC Ranger Track 2A system
• Identity management for distributed computing infrastructure
• TeraGrid Science Gateways
• Campus infrastructure for real-time data analysis and visualization
• Web Service-based HPC, data grids & research mashups

Recent Papers, Presentations and Posters

• 2010 TeraGrid Birds-of-a-Feather: NSF MATLAB Experimental Resource at Cornell
• 2010 NSF Workshop Co-PI and Host: Sustainable Funding and Business Models for High Performance Computing Centers
• 2009 NSF Workshop Participant: Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability & Reusabiity
• 2008 CASC-EDUCAUSE Workshop Participant, 2009 Report: Developing a Coherent Cyberinfrastructure from Local Campus to National Facilities: Challenges and Strategies
• 2009 SC09 Poster: Seamlessly Scaling a Desktop MATLAB Application to an Experimental TeraGrid Resource
• 2009 Cornell University Life Sciences Core Facilities Expo Poster

Previous Courses

• STSCI 4060 - Introduction to High Performance Computing Tools and Concepts
• CIS 4205 - High Performance Computing: Platforms, Tools and Effective Strategies for Computationally and Data Intensive Science
• CIS 4206 - Introduction to Scripting in Perl & Python

Education

• B.S., Computer Science, Illinois Benedictine College, 1988
• M.S., Computer Science, North Central College, 1991
• Ph.D., Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1998

Memberships/Professional Affiliations

• Association for Computing Machinery
• HPC Advisory Council
• IEEE Computer Society
• The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing
• EDUCAUSE

Employment History

• 2010- Director, Reseach Computing, Weill Cornell Medical College
• 2007- Director, Center for Advanced Computing, Cornell University
• 2005- Adjunct Associate Professor, Computing and Information Science
• 2005-2007 Director, High Performance and Innovative Computing, Computing and Information Science, Cornell University
• 2001-2005 Chief Technical Officer, Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University
• 1999-2001 Associate Director, Computer Systems, Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University
• 1995-1999 Senior Systems Programmer, Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University
• 1993-1995 Senior Technical Support Analyst, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL
• 1992-1993 Associate Computer Scientist, Petabyte Access Storage Solutions project, High Energy Physics Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL
• 1991-1992 Associate Computer Scientist, Computing and Telecommunications Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL
• 1988-1991 Assistant Computer Scientist, Computing and Telecommunications Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL