Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was just named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient. Presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) the Ken Kennedy Award is an annual honor recognizing contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and community service or mentoring contributions. You can see past award winners here.

Foster is recognized for his substantial contributions in accelerating scientific discovery in computational science by establishing innovative, newfangled applications of distributed computing both within supercomputers and over networks. His work on large-scale task-parallel programming, on-demand distributed computations (“grid computing”), virtual organizations, universal data transfer, trust fabrics, and cloud management services for data-intensive science has transformed programmability and productivity in computing.

Foster received a BSc (Hons I) degree from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a PhD from Imperial College, United Kingdom, both in computer science. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as climate change and biomedicine. Throughout his career he has created his own software, Globus, which is widely used in national and international cyberinfrastructures and co-founded his own company, Univa, Inc., which delivers grid and cloud computing solutions. Foster is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the British Computer Society. His awards include the Global Information Infrastructure Next Generation award, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal, the IEEE’s Kanai award, and honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and the Mexican Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV). 

Foster served as a CCC Council member from 2018-2022. He made pivotal contributions to the CCC during his time on the Council including writing multiple quadrennial papers and leading the ideation and subsequent whitepaper on the prospect of a National Discovery Cloud.

We join the community in congratulating Foster.