David A. Bader (born May 4, 1969) is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Bader has served on the Computing Research Association's board of directors, the National Science Foundation's advisory committee on cyberinfrastructure, and on IEEE Computer Society's board of governors. He is an expert in the design and analysis of parallel and multicore algorithms for real-world applications such as those in cybersecurity and computational biology. His main areas of research are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics. Bader built the first Linux supercomputer using commodity processors and a high-speed interconnection network.
Bader is an IEEE Fellow, an AAAS Fellow, SIAM Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. He has won awards from IBM, Microsoft Research, Nvidia, Facebook, Intel, Accenture, and Sony. He has served on numerous conference program committees related to parallel processing and has edited numerous journals. In 2018, Bader was recognized as one of the most impactful authors in the history of the IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC).
Early life and education
Bader is the son of chemistry professor Morris Bader and his wife Karen. He is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America, earning the rank in 1985. Bader graduated from Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1987.
He received a B.S. in computer engineering in 1990 and an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1991 from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He then received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1996 from the University of Maryland, College Park. While at UMD in 1992, Bader was awarded a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Fellowship by Gerald Soffen, project scientist for the Viking missions to Mars, at Goddard Space Flight Center.
Career
Bader was hired as an assistant professor and Regents' Lecturer in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1998. In 2003, he was elected chair of the IEEE Computer Society's technical committee on parallel processing. Bader remained at UNM until 2005, when he accepted a position with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Shortly after arriving at Georgia Tech, Bader began working, along with several other faculty members, to establish a School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. Two years later, in 2007, these efforts resulted in the school's establishment as an official academic unit, and Bader became a full professor in 2008 as one of the school's founding faculty. Richard M. Fujimoto was named the school's first chair, and Bader was later named the second chair of the school of CSE in July 2014. He served in that role until his term expired in June 2019.
Bader was involved in a number of research partnerships between Georgia Tech and the public and private sectors. In November 2006, Sony, Toshiba, and IBM selected Bader to direct the first Center of Competence for the Cell Processor. In 2010, Bader was a lead investigator on the Nvidia Echelon project, a $25 million DARPA Award through the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program. The four-year research collaboration with Nvidia covered work to develop new GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers. Bader and his lab partnered with Nvidia again in April 2019 to develop data analytics solutions for their GPUs.