Ian Foster (computer scientist)
Ian T. Foster | |
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Born | |
Nationality | New Zealand |
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Scientific career | |
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Thesis | Parlog as a systems programming language (1988) |
Doctoral advisor | Keith Clark |
Doctoral students | |
Website |
Ian Tremere Foster (born 1959; Wellington, New Zealand) is a New Zealand-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished fellow, senior scientist, and director of the Data Science and Learning division at Argonne National Laboratory, and a professor in the department of computer science at the University of Chicago.[4][5]
Education and career
Foster was educated at Wellington College and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and the Department of Computing, 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.[6] CI brings together computational scientists and discipline leaders to work on projects with computation as a key component.
Foster's honors include the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing (2001),[7] the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society (2002),[8] the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award (2011),[9] and the IEEE Charles Babbage Award (2019).[10] He was elected Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2001, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003,[11] and in 2009, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery,[12] who named him the inaugural recipient of the high-performance parallel and distributed computing (HPDC) achievement award in 2012.[13][14] In 2017, he was recognized with the Euro-Par Achievement Award[15] and in 2019 he was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award.[16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
Publications
- Strand: New Concepts for Parallel Programming. Prentice Hall, 1990.
- Designing and Building Parallel Programs. Addison-Wesley, 1994.
- The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.
- The Sourcebook of Parallel Computing. Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
- The Grid 2, Second Edition: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Elsevier, 2004.
- Big Data and Social Science. CRC Press, 2016.
- Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering. MIT Press, November 2017.
References
- ^ Foster, I. (2001). "The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations". International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 15 (3): 200–222. arXiv:cs/0103025. doi:10.1177/109434200101500302.
- ^ "Tim Armstrong - Research Page". University of Chicago. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
- ^ "Atilla Soner Balkır". University of Chicago. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ Foster, I.; Kesselman, C. (1997). "Globus: A Metacomputing Infrastructure Toolkit". International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. 11 (2): 115. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.48.6898. doi:10.1177/109434209701100205.
- ^ Qiu, J.; Foster, I.; Goble, C. (2014). "Emerging Computational Methods for the Life Sciences Workshop 2012". Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 26 (6): 1231. doi:10.1002/cpe.3101.
- ^ "Ian Foster appointed to third term as director of Computation Institute". University of Chicago. August 24, 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Researchers Win Gordon Bell Prize for 2001". Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Ian Foster to receive 2002 Lovelace Medal from British Computer Society". University of Chicago. October 21, 2002. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Ian T. Foster". IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Ian Foster Receives Charles Babbage Award". Argonne National Laboratory. March 20, 2019. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ Steve Koppes (November 6, 2003). "Nine on faculty elected 2003 AAAS fellows". University of Chicago Chronicle. Vol. 78, no. 4.
- ^ "Argonne's Ian Foster named Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery". Argonne National Laboratory. December 1, 2009. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Achievement Award". HPDC 2012 web site. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ Ian Foster (June 22, 2012). "20 years of grid computing" (PDF). HPDC 2012 award talk. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "The Euro-Par Achievement Award". Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Ian Foster Named Recipient of 2019 IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award". IEEE Computer Society. March 7, 2019. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Strong hints of the Higgs - live from CERN". Gridcast blog. July 4, 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
- ^ "Form D: Notice of Sale of Securities" (PDF). US Securities and Exchange Commission. August 25, 2005. Retrieved January 10, 2020.
External links
- Ian Foster publications indexed by Google Scholar
- 1959 births
- Living people
- New Zealand computer scientists
- People educated at Wellington College (New Zealand)
- Alumni of Imperial College London
- University of Canterbury alumni
- University of Chicago faculty
- Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Researchers in distributed computing
- New Zealand emigrants to the United States