Web Services for HPC — Making Seamless Computing a Reality

October 6, 2005
David Lifka | Cornell Theory Center

Seamless HPC has been a goal of Computer and Computational Scientists for over a decade. Allowing researchers to focus on their research and not the quirks of complex HPC environments has been a dream waiting for a solution. Today the solution exists but many still don’t know how to apply the tools (Web Services and SQL databases) to the problems. This talk will discuss several applications of Web Services and SQL databases to real world HPC applications including solutions for embarrassingly parallel tasks, wide area distributed computing applications, and eScience/Data Intensive Computing. Real examples of applied solutions for each of these HPC problems will be presented. Examples of programming techniques to support the use of web services installed on hundreds of distributed computing and data resources will be also be presented.

Speaker Details

David Lifka is the Director of High Performance Systems and Innovative computing for Computing and Information Sciences at Cornell University. His duties include management of the technical staff providing systems administration, consulting and systems research and development for CIS, Computer Science and the Cornell Theory Center. Lifka is an expert in Windows based high performance computing and led CTC’s technical move from proprietary UNIX to Windows-based industry standard high performance computing, working with strategic partners, including Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Unisys, Giganet, and ADIC. His areas of expertise include parallel job scheduling and resource management systems, UNIX-to-Windows migration, and HPC services. Lifka’s vision is that HPC must become pervasive and as easy to use out- of-the-box as a personal computer to make it a viable tool for more than those at academic institutions and research laboratories. Lifka is actively involved in eScience and Data Intensive Computing efforts at Cornell. Understanding the manageability and maintainability of petabyte size data repositories as well as the use of SQL Server and Web services for developing seamless HPC interfaces are of primary interest to Lifka. Lifka came to Cornell University from Argonne National Laboratory in 1995. Lifka has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and serves on a number of corporate and IT advisory boards.