Computing Seminar

Building an Open Grid: A Status Report

Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory

Abstract

Grid technologies and infrastructure support the integration of services and resources within and among enterprises, and thus allow new approaches to problem solving and interaction within distributed, multi-organizational collaborations. Sustained effort by computer scientists and application developers has resulted in the creation of a substantial open source technology, numerous infrastructure deployments, a vibrant international community, and significant application success stories. Long-term success now depends critically on three issues: open standards, open software, and open infrastructure. I discuss current efforts and future directions in each area, referring in particular to recent developments in "cyber-infrastructure" in the U.S., EGEE in Europe, Open Grid Services Architecture standards, and adoption within scientific scientific communities beyond the physical sciences.

About the speaker: Dr. Ian Foster is Associate Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. The Distributed Systems Lab that he heads at Argonne and Chicago is home to the Globus Toolkit, the open source software that has emerged as the de facto standard for Grid computing. He has published five books and over 200 articles and technical reports on various topics relating to programming languages, parallel computing, and distributed systems. He is a fellow of the British Computer Society, and has received a number of awards for his research, including the GII Next Generation Award and the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal.
See http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster for further information.