News

San Diego - March 7, 2002 - The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) has announced that Carl Kesselman, a world leader in grid computing and co-lead of the partnership's Grid Computing thrust area, has accepted an invitation to become NPACI's chief software architect. In this new role, Kesselman will be instrumental in helping to deploy the TeraGrid and support NPACI infrastructure across the partnership.

Kesselman is a co-leader of the Globus project, which has emerged as the de facto standard for grid computing and is providing the basic infrastructure for all major grid deployments internationally. Kesselman also co-chairs the TeraGrid project's Grid Working Group.

Among his many publications on the subject of grid computing architecture, Kesselman recently co-authored the widely noted paper "The Physiology of the Grid," with Globus co-leader Ian Foster of Argonne National Laboratory, Jeffrey Nick of IBM, and Steven Tuecke of ANL, that proposes an Open Grid Services Architecture.

"Carl is an international leader in grid computing and infrastructure development," said Fran Berman, director of NPACI and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "We are delighted that Carl will be helping form the nation's information infrastructure and grid vision as Chief Software Architect for NPACI." In his new NPACI role, Kesselman will join the NPACI Leadership Team, which meets regularly to provide operational direction for the partnership's activities.

Kesselman is the director of the Center for Grid Technologies at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a research associate professor in USC's Computer Science Department and a visiting associate at the Caltech Computer Science Department.

In addition, he serves on the technical advisory board for the United Kingdom's eScience initiative and the European Data Grid project. His research interests are in parallel programming languages, parallel programming environments, and high-performance distributed computing.

The $53 million TeraGrid project is funded by the National Science Foundation and includes four partners: the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, and Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, IL. When completed, the TeraGrid will include 13.6 teraflops of Linux Cluster cluster computing power distributed at the four TeraGrid sites, facilities capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes of data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing. NPACI and the National Computational Science Alliance support the success of the TeraGrid through their partners and infrastructure-building activities.

The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) unites 48 universities and research institutions to build the computational environment for tomorrow's scientific discovery. Led by the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), NPACI is funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives additional support from the State and University of California, other government agencies, and partner institutions. The NSF PACI program also supports the National Computational Science Alliance. For additional information about NPACI, see http://www.npaci.edu/, or contact David Hart at SDSC, 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu.

MEDIA CONTACT: David L. Hart, NPACI/SDSC 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu