Keynote Talk

Making Infrastructure Invisible

Dr. Dan Reed, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Extreme Computing

Location and Time: November 16th, 2009, Room A105, 9:05AM

Abstract

History has shown that successful technologies are invisible, enriching and empowering the lives of their users without requiring them to know or understand the idiosyncrasies of the technology itself.  Computation enabled discovery is poised on this threshold, to move researchers beyond the need for intimate knowledge of clusters, grids, clouds or other computing infrastructure.  This talk will survey some of the challenges, both technical and sociological, that must be faced to enable this transformation.

Links: [slides]

Biography

Dr. Daniel A. Reed is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for the Extreme Computing Group, responsible for R&D on parallel and extreme scale computing, including cloud infrastructure.  Previously, he was the Chancellor’s Eminent Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as the Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Chancellor’s Senior Advisor for Strategy and Innovation for UNC Chapel Hill.  Dr. Reed has served as a member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and as a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC).  He recently chaired a review of the U.S. networking and IT research portfolio and completed two terms as chair of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA).   He was previously Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He has also been Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC, where he also led National Computational Science Alliance. He was also one of the principal investigators and chief architect for the NSF TeraGrid.  He received his PhD in computer science in 1983 from Purdue University and is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.