Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

Rahul Dave trained as an astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his doctorate in 2002. His doctoral work included the first systematic study of the effects of dark energy on the expansion history and fluctuation development in the universe. He was the leader of an Intel-funded effort at Penn to create a large-scale commodity cluster shared by researchers across the university from fields as diverse as linguistics and chemistry. As a part of that effort, he developed a backfill scheduler to ensure full utilization of the cluster when running bioinformatics codes with unpredictable running times. He is a member of the TAOS project, which is looking for Kuiper Belt objects in the outer solar system by making wide-field, high-cadence observations to detect occultation of stars by these objects.  Working with the Time Series Center at the IIC, he currently is developing search and database technology to make possible near-real-time queries on metadata and morphology aspects of large databases of time series.