ARGONNE, Ill. (November 24, 2009)- Ian Foster, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, has been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The fellows program, established in 1993, honors ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. Only the top 1 percent of ACM members are honored with this prestigious award.

An outstanding example of Foster’s achievements was the development of the Globus Toolkit, now a de facto standard used worldwide for collaborative scientific and engineering projects. Globus won an R&D 100 award from R&D magazine in 2002.

“Foster’s pioneering work in distributed computing and infrastructure for large-scale science has earned him the informal title of ​‘father of the Grid,’ said Ewing Lusk, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne.

Foster has long focused on advanced computing. His early research involved parallel programming languages. He (with a colleague) won the British Computer Society Award for Technical Innovation in 1989 for the development of Strand. He currently leads the design of Swift, a parallel scripting system that coordinates execution of loosely coupled tasks across Grid systems.

Complementing Foster’s research contributions is his leadership in high-performance computing. He founded and still leads Argonne’s Distributed Computing Laboratory and is associate director of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, which conducts leading-edge research in the computing sciences. He also heads DOE’s Center for Enabling Distributed Petascale Science and is director of the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation Institute.

Foster’s achievements have earned him numerous awards, including the Lovelace Medal, a Gordon Bell Prize for high-performance supercomputing, and one of the first GridWorld Industry Leadership awards. Foster was named R&D Magazine Innovator of the Year in 2003, Silicon​.com Top 50 Agenda Setter in 2003 and 2004, and Network World’s 50 Most Powerful People in Networking in 2005. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is Chan Soon-Shiong and Arthur Holly Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago.

Foster and the other new ACM fellows will be recognized at the 2010 ACM Awards Banquet in June 2010. ACM is the world’s first educational and scientific computing society for professionals and students. Its goal is to advance computing by disseminating computing research and providing forums to address challenging computing issues.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.