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 national laboratory operated by UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facility is located in Lemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and is the lar ...

, 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 university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

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 m ...

, New Zealand, in 1959. He was educated at Wellington College 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 ...

. 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 for high-performance computing (2001), the Lovelace Medal 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 (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) the IEEE Computer Society Harry H Goode Memorial Award (2020), the IEEE Internet Award (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 networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

. With Carl Kesselman 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 ...

: 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 m ...

. 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 Rolf-Dieter Heuer (; born 24 May 1948 in Boll) is a German particle physicist. From 2009 to 2015 he was Director General of CERN and from 5 April 2016 to 9 April 2018 President of the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft). ...

as one of the elements essential for the 2012 discovery of the

Higgs boson The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the St ...

. 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 ...

for high-performance

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.

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 throug ...

, 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'', ...

, 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 publ ...

, 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