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Richard Knepper
Director

Richard Knepper

Rich is the Director of the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, leading the planning and operations of the center, with a focus on meeting the evolving needs of Cornell researchers and the broader scientific community. Rich joined CAC in 2017 as Deputy Director, coming from Indiana University, where he previously led the Campus Bridging and Research Infrastructure team. Rich earned his PhD in Informatics at the Indiana Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Rich's research interests include the establishment and governance of cyberinfrastructure organizations, high performance and cloud computing, application containerization, and ethnography of virtual organizations.

Send email or phone 607-255-0313


Areas of Research or Expertise

  • Campus clouds and federations
  • Reproducible and portable workflows
  • Cyberinfrastructure organization, leadership, and training
  • Relationship between cyberinfrastructure resources and scientific outcomes
  • Operations and production systems management
  • Social Network analysis
  • Ethnography of virtual organizations

Projects

  • I-WRF: Large-Scale Atmospheric Research Using an Integrated WRF Modeling, Visualization, and Verification Container Framework - NSF PI 2022-2026
  • An Actor-Network Investigation of the XSEDE Project - NSF PI 2021-2023
  • Aristotle Cloud Federation: Containerizing Scientific Applications
  • XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration
  • Campus Advancing Research Computing Consortium - Emerging Centers Facing
  • Linux Clusters Institute - Steering Committee

Selected Publications and Presentations

Stewart, C., Wernert, J., Costa, C., Hancock, D. Y., Knepper, R., & Snapp-Childs, W. (2022). Return on Investment in Research Cyberinfrastructure: State of the Art. Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, 1-4.
Chen, Y. C., & Knepper, R. (2021). US cyberinfrastructure for scientific innovation: adaptation, management, and performance. In Research Handbook on E-Government. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Vaillancourt, P., Wineholt, B., Barker, B., Deliyannis, P., Zheng, J., Suresh, A., Brazier, A., Knepper, R. and Wolski, R. Reproducible and Portable Workflows for Scientific Computing and HPC in the Cloud. PEARC'20: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing. 2020.
Vaillancourt, P., Coulter, J.E., Knepper, R. and Barker, B.Self-Scaling Clusters and Reproducible Containers to Enable Scientific Computing. arXiv. 2020.
Knepper, R., Mehringer, S., Brazier, A., Barker, B. and Reynolds, R.Red Cloud and Aristotle: campus clouds and federation. HARC'19: Proceedings of the Humans in the Loop: Enabling and Facilitating Research on the Cloud. 2019.
Stewart, C.A., Knepper, R., Link, M.R., Pierce, M., Wernert, E., and Wilkins-Diehr, N. Cyberinfrastructure, cloud computing, science gateways, visualization, and cyberinfrastructure ease of use. Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 4th Edition. 2019.
Coulter, E., Sprouse, J., Reynolds, R. and Knepper, R. Extending XSEDE Innovations to Campus Cyberinfrastructure: The XSEDE National Integration Toolkit. Journal of Computational Science Education,. 2019.
Coulter, J.E., Knepper, R., Reynolds, R., Sprouse, J. and Bird, S. Beyond Campus Bridging: A Retrospective of Cyberinfrastructure Integration Efforts. PEARC'19: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing. 2019.
Dooley, R., Edmonds, A., Hancock, D.Y., Lowe, J.M., Skidmore, E., Adams, A.K., Kiser, R., Krenz, M., Welch, V. and Knepper. R. Security best practices for academic cloud service providers. 2018.
Atkin, D., Belgin, M., Bouvet, T.A., Bright, N.C., Harrel, S., Haymore, B., Jennings, M., Knepper, R. et al. Linux Clusters Institute workshops: Building the HPC and research computing systems professionals workforce. Proceedings of HPC Systems Professionals Workshop. 2017.
Knepper, R and Standish, M. Forward Observer systems for radar data workflows: Big data management in the field. Future Generation Computer Systems. 2017.
Knepper, R. Shifting Modalities of Use in the XSEDE Project. Indiana University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. 2017.
Coulter, E., Fischer, J., Hallock, B., Knepper, R., Lifka, D., Navarro, JP., Pierce, M., Stewart, C. Cyberinfrastructure as a Platform to Facilitate Effective Collaboration between Institutions and Support Collaboratories. Proceedings of 2016 ACM SIGUCCS Conference. 2016.
Knepper, R. and Börner, K. Comparing the Consumption of CPU Hours with Scientific Output for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). PLOS One. 2016.
Knepper, R. and Chen, Y. Situating Cyberinfrastructure in the Public Realm: The TeraGrid and XSEDE Projects. Proceedings of dg.o '16, 17th International Digital Government Research Conference. 2016.

Education

B.S., Literature, New College, Florida
M.A., Polish Studies, Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University
M.P.A., Public Administration, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University
Ph.D., Informatics, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University

Memberships/Professional Affiliations

CASC, Positions Committee 2021-2022, Vice Chair 2023-2024
Workshop on Scalable Computing, Program Committee
Int'l Conference on ICT Innovations, Program Committee

Personal Interests

Travel, reading, and technology.
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