Ian Foster is a Distinguished Fellow and the 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.
Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society, the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing (2001), IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award (2011), as well as others. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2009. He is currently serving on the Advisory Board for IOCOM Communications.
Ian is originally from New Zealand but is now based in the United States. He has three nieces in Sydney, Australia.
Famous quotes containing the word foster:
“Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on the hustings as at the fireside.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)