Ian Foster is Senior Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he also leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research concerns techniques, tools, and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing, parallel computing, and computational science. Foster led the 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 (a live experiment at the Supercomputing conference of 1995).
Most recently Carl Kesselman received international recognition for GUSTO, the world's first high-performance computational grid. GUSTO pushes the technological envelope by using high-speed networks and software to provide global access to advanced supercomputers and other devices.