Ian Foster

Ian T. Foster ( born 1959 in Wellington, New Zealand ) is a New Zealand -born computer scientist who deals with parallel and distributed computing for high performance. He is a professor at the University of Chicago. He's Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor and Distinguished Fellow of the Argonne Lab.

Foster studied at the University of Canterbury with a Bachelor 's degree in computer science and at Imperial College London, where he received his doctorate in 1988 at Keith Clark ( Parlog as a system programming language ). He was at Argonne National Laboratory before he became a professor in Chicago. He is director of the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and the Argonne Lab.

He is regarded as the inventor of Grid computing, Carl Kesselman and Steven malice. Foster was co-founder of the open source Globus project (Globus Online Globus Toolkit ).

He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Computer Society ( 2001). He received the Medal of the British Computer Society Lovelace and the Gordon Bell Prize (2001), the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award ( 2011), the Global Information Infrastructure ( GII ) Next Generation Award and in 2012 the High - Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing Achievement Award. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury and the Mexican Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute ( CINVESTAV ).

In 2004 he was co-founder of Univa UD, Inc., a company specializing in grid and cloud computing.

Writings

• With Carl Kesselman: The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, 2nd Edition, Elsevier, 2004
• With C. Kesselman: Globus: A metacomputing infrastructure toolkit, International journal of high performance computing applications, Volume 11, 1997, pp. 115-128