Ian T. Foster
The Grid: Reality, Technology, and Applications
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Dr. Ian T. Foster, will talk about The Grid: Reality, Technology, and Applications. The Grid seems to be everywhere, with announcements of sales from major computer vendors, deployment in a wide range of application spaces, and many national and international scale infrastructure deployment. However, in spite of the popularity of the term, there is often confusion as to what the Grid is and what problems it solves. Is there any "there there" or is it all just marketing hype?

In this talk, Dr. Foster will address these questions, describing what the Grid is, what problems it solves, and what technology has been developed to build Grid infrastructure and create Grid applications. Dr. Foster will review the current status of Grid infrastructure and deployment and give examples of where Grid technology is being used not only to perform current tasks better, but to provide fundamentally new capabilities that are not possible otherwise.

Dr. Ian Foster, co-author of "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure", is an internationally recognized researcher and leader in the area of Grid computing. His Distributed Systems Lab at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago is home to the Globus Toolkit, the open source software that has emerged as the de facto standard for Grid computing. Foster is also Chief Open Source Strategist at Univa Corporation, a company he founded with other Globus leaders to foster and promote the adoption of Globus as the premier open source Grid technology. Foster is a fellow of the British Computer Society and AAAS. His awards include the GII Next Generation Award and the Lovelace Medal.
IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler