Nationality New Zealand Name Ian Foster | Doctoral advisor Keith Clark | |
 | ||
Institutions University of Chicago
Argonne National Laboratory Alma mater University of Canterbury
Imperial College London (PhD) Thesis Parlog as a systems programming language (1988) Doctoral students Timothy Armstrong
Soner Balkir
Catalin Dumitrescu
Adriana Iamnitchi
Chuang Liu
Quan Pham
Ioan Raicu
Kavitha Ranganathan
Matei Ripeanu
Alain Roy
Borja Sotomayor
Lingyun Yang
Zhao Zhang
Yong Zhao Known for Grid Computing
Globus Toolkit Residence Chicago, Illinois, United States Books Designing and building parallel programs Education Imperial College London, University of Canterbury Fields Computer Science, Grid computing People also search for Wolfgang Gentzsch, Keith Clark, Geoffrey E Petts | ||
Ian foster an open letter from the island
Ian T. Foster (born 1959 in Wellington, New Zealand) is a New Zealand-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished fellow and senior scientist in the mathematics and computer science division at Argonne National Laboratory, and a professor in the department of computer science at the University of Chicago.
Contents
Education and career
Foster was educated at Wellington College and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Imperial College London.
From 2006 to 2016, he was director of the Computation Institute (CI), a joint project between the University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory. CI brings together computational scientists and discipline leaders to work on projects with computation as a key component.
Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society, the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing (2001), and the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award (2011). He was elected Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2001, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003, and in 2009, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, who named him the inaugural recipient of the high-performance parallel and distributed computing (HPDC) achievement award in 2012.. In 2017, he was recognized with the Euro-Par Achievement Award.
Research
Foster's research focuses on the acceleration of discovery in a network using distributed computing. With Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke, Foster coined the term grid computing: techniques for data-intensive, multi-institution collaboration that paved the way for cloud computing. Methods and software developed under his leadership advanced discovery in areas as high energy physics, environmental science, and biomedicine. For example, grid computing was credited by CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer as one of the elements essential for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson.
His research has also resulted in the development of techniques, tools and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing and parallel computing. His Globus Toolkit project encouraged collaborative computing for engineering, business and other fields. In March 2004, Foster co-founded Univa Corporation to commercialize the technology.