John DiMarco is presently the Director of Information Technology at
the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Toronto, his
alma mater.
Following his
B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the university,
during which he held two NSERC
University undergraduate student research awards and numerous scholarships,
he became a Research Associate in the University of Toronto's Computer
Science department for two years. When the department's UNIX teaching laboratory migrated
from minicomputers to workstations, he took the lead technical role in the
migration, and became systems manager of the laboratory for five years. In
mid-1993, he took a short leave of absence from the department to help
develop and port distributed systems software technology for Platform Computing, returning to the
department at the end of that year. In 1995 he completed a part-time
M.Sc. degree in
Computer Science (in distributed systems). In 1996, he became manager
of the department's research
laboratory, a position he held until the fall of 2002. At that point,
the department announced its intention to create the role of IT Director;
he acted in that role until it was finalized in February, 2004, at which
time he assumed that position.
As Director of IT, and as as manager of the Computer Science
Laboratory, DiMarco has overseen the growth of the facility in almost every
respect: a 100% increase in the number of different system platforms
supported, a 30% increase in research members, an 80% increase in desktops,
and the introduction and support of key technologies. These include fully
switched wire-speed layer 3 networking, storage area networks, firewalling
and secure session tunneling, system virtualization and consolidation, server
clustering, and multi-protocol, multi-platform systems integration.
He helped oversee and co-ordinate the department's participation in the
university's
Bahen Centre for Information Technology, completed in 2002. Acting in
both a managerial and a senior technical capacity, he has overseen the
integration of both proprietary and commodity hardware and software, along
with locally developed technology, into an advanced research laboratory
infrastructure that provides comprehensive computing support in all areas of
computer science research.
DiMarco is the author and/or part-author of various free software utilities
for Sun and other UNIX systems. With Bill Bradford, he presently runs the Sun Managers mailing list, a task he
has carried out since 1992. He is the maintainer of the internet
master format.dat for Sun systems, and
maintained the USENET comp.benchmarks SPECtable from 1993 to
2000. He has acted in a consultative capacity for a number of technology
companies and public institutes.
