Program Committee

Workshop Chairs

Ioan Raicu, Northwestern University

Ian Foster, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory

Yong Zhao, Microsoft

 

Dr. Ioan Raicu is a NSF/CRA Computation Innovation Fellow at Northwestern University, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Ioan holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Chicago under the guidance of Dr. Ian Foster. He is a 3-year award winner of the GSRP Fellowship from NASA Ames Research Center. His research work and interests are in the general area of distributed systems. His dissertation work focused on this relatively new paradigm of Many-Task Computing (MTC), which aims to bridge the gap between two predominant paradigms from distributed systems, High-Throughput Computing (HTC) and High-Performance Computing (HPC). His dissertation work focused on defining and exploring both the theory and practical aspects of realizing MTC across a wide range of large-scale distributed systems. He is particularly interested in efficient task dispatch and execution systems, resource provisioning, data management, scheduling, and performance evaluations in distributed systems. His work has been funded by the NASA Ames Research Center Graduate Student Research Program, the DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, and most recently by the prestigious NSF/CRA CIFellows program. Ioan's future work will focus on resource management in large scale distributed systems with a focus on many-task computing, data intensive computing, cloud computing, grid computing, and many-core computing. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.

Dr. Ian Foster is the Associate Division Director and a Senior Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and he is an Arthur Holly Compton Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is also involved with both the Open Grid Forum and with the Globus Alliance as an open source strategist. In 2006, he was appointed director of the Computation Institute, a joint project between the University of Chicago, and Argonne. An earlier project, Strand, received the British Computer Society Award for technical innovation. His research resulted in the development of techniques, tools and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing and parallel computing. As a result he is denoted as "the father of the Grid". Foster led research and development of software for the I-WAY wide-area distributed computing experiment, which connected supercomputers, databases and other high-end resources at 17 sites across North America in 1995. His own labs, the Distributed Systems Laboratory is the nexus of the multi-institute Globus Project, a research and development effort that encourages collaborative computing by providing advances necessary for engineering, business and other fields. Furthermore the Computation Institute addresses many of the most challenging computational and communications problems facing Grid implementations today. In 2004, he founded Univa Corporation, which was merged with United Devices in 2007 and operate under the name Univa UD. Foster's honors include the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society, the Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance computing (2001), as well as others. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. Dr. Foster also serves as PI or Co-PI on projects connected to the DOE global change program, the National Computational Science Alliance, the NASA Information Power Grid project, the NSF Grid Physics Network, GRIDS Center, and International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory projects, and other DOE and NSF programs. His research is supported by DOE, NSF, NASA, Microsoft, and IBM.

Dr. Yong Zhao obtained his PhD in Computer Science from The University of Chicago under Dr. Ian Foster's supervision, and is best known for the GriPhyN Virtual Data System (VDS), a data and workflow management system for data-intensive science collaborations. VDS plays a fundamental role in various Data Grid projects such as iVDGL (International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory), PPDG (Partical Physics Data Grid), OSG (Open Science Grid) etc. The system has been applied to scientific applications in various disciplines such as the high energy physics experiments CMS and ATLAS, the astrophysics project Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the QuarkNet science education project, and various Neuroscience and bioinformatics projects. He also developed the Swift system, a programming tool for fast, scalable and reliable loosely-coupled parallel computation. Swift comprises a simple scripting language called SwiftScript to represent complex scientific workflows, and a scalable runtime system to schedule hundreds of thousands of jobs onto distributed and parallel computing resources. The Angle cyber-infrastructure protection project, the SC'07 Analytics Challenge first place winner, is based on the Swift system. He has also been actively involved in the Falkon project, a lightweight task execution framework for high throughput computing. He is now working at Microsoft on Business Intelligence projects that leverage large scale storage and computing infrastructures for Web analytics and behavior targeting. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.

 

Keynote Speaker

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. 

Technical Committee

* David Abramson, Monash University, Australia
* Pete Beckman, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Peter Dinda, Northwestern University, USA
* Ian Foster, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Bob Grossman, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
* Indranil Gupta, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA
* Alexandru Iosup, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
* Kamil Iskra, Argonne National Laboratory, USA 
* Chuang Liu, Ask.com, USA
* Zhou Lei, Shanghai University, China
* Shiyong Lu, Wayne State University, USA
* Reagan Moore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
* Marlon Pierce, Indiana University, USA
* Ioan Raicu, Northwestern University, USA
* Matei Ripeanu, University of British Columbia, Canada
* David Swanson, University of Nebraska, USA
* Greg Thain, Univeristy of Wisconsin, USA
* Mike Wilde, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
* Matthew Woitaszek, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
* Sherali Zeadally, University of the District of Columbia, USA
* Yong Zhao, Microsoft, USA