Ian Foster
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Ian Foster is the Senior Scientist (Associate Division Director) in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and he is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is also involved with both the Open Grid Forum and with the Globus Alliance as an open source strategist. In 2006, he was appointed director of the Computation Institute, a joint project between the University of Chicago, and Argonne. An earlier project, Strand, received the British Computer Society Award for technical innovation.
His research resulted in the development of techniques, tools and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing and parallel computing. As a result he is denoted as “the father of the Grid”. Foster led 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 in 1995. His own labs, the Distributed Systems Laboratory is the nexus of the multi-institute Globus Project, a research and development effort that encourages collaborative computing by providing advances necessary for engineering, business and other fields. Furthermore the Computation Institute addresses many of the most challenging computational and communications problems facing Grid implementations today.
In 2004, he founded Univa Corporation, which was merged with United Devices in 2007 and operate under the name Univa UD.
Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society, the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing (2001), as well as others. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003.
