Ian Tremere Foster (born 1 January 1959) 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 Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

, and a professor in the department of computer science at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

Education and career

Foster was born in

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by me ...

, New Zealand, in 1959. He was educated at

Wellington College Wellington College may refer to: *Wellington College, Berkshire, an independent school in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England ** Wellington College International Shanghai ** Wellington College International Tianjin * Wellington College, Wellington, Ne ...

and the

University of Canterbury The University of Canterbury ( mi, Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha; postnominal abbreviation ''Cantuar.'' or ''Cant.'' for ''Cantuariensis'', the Latin name for Canterbury) is a public research university based in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was ...

, followed by the Department of Computing,

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

. From 2006 to 2016, he was director of the Computation Institute (CI), a joint project between the

, and

. CI brings together computational scientists and discipline leaders to work on projects with computation as a key component. He is currently Director of the Data Science and Learning Division at

, a unit established to tackle advanced scientific problems where data analysis and artificial intelligence can provide critical insights and accelerate discovery.

Honors

Foster's honors include the

Gordon Bell Prize The Gordon Bell Prize, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing, is an award presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series (formerly known as the Supercomputing Confere ...

for high-performance computing (2001), the

Lovelace Medal The Lovelace Medal was established by the British Computer Society in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the UK. Awar ...

of the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

(2002), an honorary

Doctor of Science Doctor of Science ( la, links=no, Scientiae Doctor), usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D., or D.S., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries, "Doctor of Science" is the degree used f ...

from the University of Canterbury in 2005, the IEEE

Tsutomu Kanai Award The Tsutomu Kanai Award was established by the IEEE Computer Society in 1997 by an endowment from Hitachi Ltd., and named in honor of Dr. Tsutomu Kanai, who served as Hitachi’s president for 30 years. The Kanai Award may be presented annually ...

(2011), the IEEE Computer Society

Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered ...

Award, (with

Carl Kesselman Carl Kesselman is an American computer scientist specializing in grid computing technologies. This term was developed by him and professor Ian Foster in the book ''The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''. He and Foster are winner ...

) the IEEE Computer Society Harry H Goode Memorial Award (2020), the

IEEE Internet Award IEEE Internet Award is a Technical Field Award established by the IEEE in June 1999. The award is sponsored by Nokia Corporation. It may be presented annually to an individual or up to three recipients, for exceptional contributions to the adv ...

(2023), and the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award (2022). He was elected Fellow of the

in 2001,

Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS) is an honor accorded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to distinguished persons who are members of the Association. Fellows are elected ...

in 2003, and in 2009, a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

, who named him the inaugural recipient of the high-performance parallel and distributed computing (HPDC) achievement award in 2012. In 2017, he was recognized with the Euro-Par Achievement Award.

Research

Foster's research focuses on the acceleration of discovery in a network using

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

. With

and Steve Tuecke, Foster coined the term

grid computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...

: techniques for data-intensive, multi-institution collaboration that paved the way for

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

. 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 The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

director

Rolf-Dieter Heuer Rolf-Dieter Heuer (; born 24 May 1948 in Bad Boll, Boll) is a German particle physics, particle physicist. From 2009 to 2015 he was List of Directors General of CERN, Director General of CERN and from 5 April 2016 to 9 April 2018 President of the ...

as one of the elements essential for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson. His research has also resulted in the development of techniques, tools and

algorithms In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing c ...

for high-performance

and

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

. His

Globus Toolkit The Globus Toolkit is an open-source toolkit for grid computing developed and provided by the Globus Alliance. On 25 May 2017 it was announced that the open source support for the project would be discontinued in January 201 due to a lack of f ...

project encouraged collaborative computing for engineering, business and other fields. In March 2004, Foster co-founded

Univa Univa was a software company that developed workload management and cloud management products for compute-intensive applications in the data center and across public, private, and hybrid clouds, before being acquired by Altair Engineering in Septe ...

Corporation to commercialize the technology.

Publications

*''Strand: New Concepts for Parallel Programming''.

Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market, and distributes its technical titles through the Safari B ...

, 1990. *
Designing and Building Parallel Programs
'.

Addison-Wesley Addison-Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles through ...

, 1994. *''The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''.

Morgan Kaufmann Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is a Burlington, Massachusetts (San Francisco, California until 2008) based publisher specializing in computer science and engineering content. Since 1984, Morgan Kaufmann has published content on information technology ...

, 1998. *''The Sourcebook of Parallel Computing''.

, 2003. *''The Grid 2, Second Edition: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''.

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

, 2004. *
Big Data and Social Science
'.

CRC Press The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information tec ...

, 2016. *
Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering
'.

MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

, November 2017.

Footnotes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Foster, Ian 1959 births Living people New Zealand computer scientists People educated at Wellington College (New Zealand) Alumni of the Department of Computing, 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