Ian Foster
/ University of Chicago/ Alison Brizius
Principal Investigator, RDCEP
Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago
Director, Computation Institute, Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago
Associate Director, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Areas of Expertise:
- Computer Science: Collaborative computing
- Computer Science: Grid computing
- Computer Science: High-performance computing
Foster develops tools and techniques that allow people to use high-performance computers in innovative ways. He co-invented grid computing, which has become the de facto computation standard for data-intensive, mutli-institution collaboration. As director of the Computation Institute, Foster brings together computational scientists and discipline thought leaders to work on a wide range of projects, with computation as a key component. He oversees the Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL), which operates at both the University of Chicago and at Argonne National Laboratory. The DSL serves as the nexus of the multi-institutional Globus Project, a research and development effort that provides the advances required to make collaborative computing successful in science, engineering, business and other areas. Globus technologies are used by thousands of researchers worldwide and form the basis of several dozen national and international collaborative computing projects.
In March 2006, Foster was appointed director of the Computation Institute, a joint project between the University and Argonne that addresses the most challenging computational and communications problems arising from a broad range of intellectual pursuits.
Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society and the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance supercomputing.
Research Projects
FACE-IT | pSIMS | Parched Earth | Shadowing | CIM-EARTH | SOLE | GGCMI | Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections | InterSectoral Impacts Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (ISI-MIP) |
Former Students and Postdoctoral Scholars
Sou-Cheng Choi | Quan Tran Pham | Adriana Ciccone | Jeremy Archer
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Samuel Kortum, Gita Khun Jush, Todd Munson, and David Weisbach. "Unilateral carbon taxes, border adjustments, and carbon leakage." Theoretical Inquiries in Law 14 (2013): 207-243.
J. Elliott, C. Muller, D. Deryng, J. Chryssanthacopoulos, K. J. Boote, M. Buchner, I. Foster, M. Glotter, J. Heinke, T. Iizumi, R. C. Izaurralde, N. D. Mueller, D. K. Ray, C. Rosenzweig, A. C. Ruane, and J. Sheffield. The global gridded crop model intercomparison: data and modeling protocols for phase 1 (v1.0). Geoscientific Model Development, 8(2):261–277, 2015.
Foster, Ian, Joshua Elliott, James Jones, and Raffaele Montella (2013). "FACE-IT: Framework to Advance Climate, Economics, and Impact Investigations with Information Technology," Abstract NH51B-1618 presented at 2013 Fall Meeting AGU, San Francisco, Calif., 9-13 Dec.
Glotter, Michael, Joshua Elliott, David McInerney, Neil Best, David Kelly, Ian Foster, and Elisabeth Moyer. "Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8776-8781.
Michael Glotter, Joshua Elliott, David McInerney, Neil Best, Ian Foster, and Elisabeth J Moyer. Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24):8776–8781, 2014.
Earlier version also available as a working paper: Loudermilk M, Elliott J, Foster I, Munson T. Computable General Equilibrium Analysis of Economic Policies on the US Biofuels Market, Working Paper.
Montella, R., Kelly, D., Xiong, W., Brizius, A., Elliott, J., Madduri, R., Maheshwari, K., Porter, C., Vilter, P., Wilde, M., Zhang, M., and Foster, I. (2015) FACE-IT: A science gateway for food security research. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, doi: 10.1002/cpe.3540
Raffaele Montella, Alison Brizius, Joshua Elliott, David Kelly, Ravi Madduri, Ketan Maheshwari, Cheryl Porter, Peter Vilter, Michael Wilde, Wei Xiong, Meng Zhang, and Ian Foster. Face-it: A science gateway for food security research. In Proceedings of the 9th Gateway Computing Environments Workshop, GCE ’14, pages 42–46, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2014. IEEE Press.
Quan Pham, Tanu Malik, and Ian Foster. Auditing and maintaining provenance in software packages. In Provenance and Annotation of Data and Processes, pages 97–109. Springer, 2014.
Kyle Chard, Jim Pruyne, Ben Blaiszik, Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Steven Tuecke, and Ian Foster. Globus data publication as a service: Lowering barriers to reproducible science. 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience, Munich, Germany, 2015.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Margaret Loudermilk, and Todd Munson. "Modeling of Land-Use Changes and Other Indirect Effects of Biofuel Production in CIM-EARTH," Prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy Biomass Program, Final Report October 2011.
Joshua Elliott, David Kelly, James Chryssanthacopoulos, Michael Glotter, Kanika Jhunjhnuwala, Neil Best, Michael Wilde, and Ian Foster. The parallel system for integrating impact models and sectors (psims). Environmental Modelling & Software, 62:509–516, 2014.
Elliott, Joshua, Ian Foster, Kenneth Judd, Elisabeth Moyer, and Todd Munson. "CIM-EARTH: Community Integrated Model of Economic and Resource Trajectories for Humankind" Mathematics and Computer Science Division Technical Memorandum ANL/MCS-TM-307. 2010.
