Dr. Ian Foster

Dr. Ian Foster, FBCS, FAAAS, Hon DSc is known as the “Father of Grid Computing”. His leadership in this field has its roots in his PhD work at Imperial College London in 1988. “I focused on the technology for building concurrent systems and what was needed to make them run efficiently on parallel computers”, he says. “That later naturally led into grid computing, so in effect ever since leaving Imperial College I’ve continued on the work I started there.” He is head of the Distributed Systems Lab, Mathematics & Computer Science at the Argonne National Laboratory and Arthur Holly Compton Professor of Computer Science at The University of Chicago.
 
Ian is also Cofounder of the Globus Consortium which developed the Globus Toolkit, the open source software that has emerged as the de facto standard for Grid computing and is Cofounder of Univa Corporation which is transforming enterprise IT by harnessing the power of Globus® open source software to deliver enterprise-class products, technical support, and professional services to corporations and government.
 
His research interests include algorithms and programming languages for scalable parallel computers, software engineering, and the application of parallel processing to problems in computational science. Ian led the research and development of software for the I-WAY wide-area distributed computing experiment, which connected supercomputers, databases, and other high-end resources at 17 sites across North America. This live experiment was conducted at the 1995 Supercomputing Conference.
 
Ian was awarded the 1989 British Computer Society Award for Technical Innovation for his work on the Strand parallel programming language, Best Paper Award at the 1995 Supercomputing Conference, the 2001 Gordon Bell Award for “A Data Management Infrastructure for Climate Modeling Research”, the 2002 Lovelace Medal, Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2002, R & D Magazine’s 2003 Innovator of the Year, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003, and a 2005 D.Sc (Honoris Causi) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
 
He is coeditor of The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. He authored Designing and Building Parallel Programs : Concepts and Tools for Parallel Software Engineering and coauthored Strand: New Concepts in Parallel Programming.
 
He authored What is the Grid? A Three Point Checklist in GRIDToday, The Grid: Computing Without Bounds in Scientific American, The Grid: A New Infrastructure for 21st Century Science in Physics Today, The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations in International Journal of Supercomputer Applications and High Performance Computing, Service-Oriented Science in Science magazine, and Internet Computing and the Emerging Grid in Nature magazine.
 
Ian earned a degree with honors in computer science at Canterbury University, Christchurch, in his native New Zealand in 1979. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College London, England in 1988.