09/18/2003
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard
375
Arlington, VA 22230

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. Application communities are now working to deploy and apply these technologies more broadly, and thus we encounter ever more challenging requirements for scale, functionality, and robustness. In this talk, I seek to define the nature of the opportunities, achievements, and challenges that underlie this work.

I describe the current state and likely evolution of the core technologies, focusing in particular on the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), which integrates Grid technologies with emerging Web services standards. I discuss the implications of these developments for science, engineering, and industry, and present some of the lessons learned within large projects that apply the technologies. I also examine the opportunities and challenges that Grid deployments and applications present for computer scientists.

Brief BIO:

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 numerous awards for his research, including the GII Next Generation Award and the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal.