The Grid: Opportunities, Achievements, and Challenges

Ian Foster

The University of Chicago

Wed Mar 17 15:10:00 NZDT 2004 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

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.

Biography

Ian Foster is Associate Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory and the Arthur Holly Compton Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests are in distributed and parallel computing and computational science, and he has published six books and over 200 articles and technical reports on these and related topics. He is an internationally recognized researcher and leader in Grid computing, and leads projects applying Grid technologies to scientific and engineering problems, in such fields as high energy physics, climate data analysis, and earthquake engineering. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the British Computer Society. His awards include the British Computer Society's award for technical innovation, the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Next Generation award, the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal, and Research and Development Magazine's Innovator of the Year.