Computing Seminar

Grid Technologies and Applications:
Architecture and Achievements

Ian Foster
Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago

Abstract

The last 18 months have seen significant advances in Grid computing, both within and outside high energy physics. While in early 2000, Grid computing was a novel concept that many were being exposed to for the first time, we now see considerable consensus on Grid architecture, a solid and widely adopted technology base, major funding initiatives, a wide variety of projects developing applications and technologies, and major deployment projects aimed at creating robust Grid infrastructures.

I provide a summary of major developments and trends, focusing in particular on the Globus open source Grid software project and the GriPhyN data grid project.

About the speaker: Dr. Ian Foster is Senior Scientist and Associate Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and Senior Fellow in the Argonne/U.Chicago Computation Institute. He has published four books and numerous articles in parallel and distributed processing, software engineering, and computational science. He currently co-leads the Globus project with Dr. Carl Kesselman of USC/ISI, which was awarded the 1997 Global Information Infrastructure "Next Generation'' award and which provides protocols and services used by many distributed computing projects worldwide. He co-founded the influential Grid Forum and recently co-edited with Kesselman a book on this topic, published by Morgan-Kaufmann, entitled "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure."