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WebCom-G, a Candidate Operating System for Grid-Ireland,
Dr. John P. Morrison,
University College Cork, Ireland
If it is accepted that Grid computing will be an important technology in the near to long term then
wide spread acceptance will depend on making that technology easily accessible to general
exploitation. In practice, this will not only involve making Grid computing resources available to
end user communities but, most importantly, it will require that non specialists be facilitated in
constructing grid independent applications that run efficiently on the dynamic architecture the
constitutes the Grid. The original problems of programming parallel and distributed systems still
hold true and so solutions must be developed to free programmers from the low level details
whose consideration gives rise to these problems. In effect, grid programming environments must
evolve to a point where grid (and, in general, parallel) programs are freed from architecture
details such as data locality, machine availability, inter-task synchronisation, communication
topologies, task load-balancing, and fault tolerance
Bio
Dr. Morrison has spent 13 years as a member of staff in the Computer
Science Department of University College Cork, Ireland, where is a
senior lecturer. Before coming to Cork, he worked as a research scientist
at the Philips' Natuurkundig Laboratorium in the Netherlands and
received his PhD in the Parallel Architecture Group in the Technische
Universiteit Eindhoven under the direction of Prof Martin Rem.
He is the founder and director of the Centre for Unified Computing,
which has a staff of 20 researchers. He is a cofounder and co-director of
the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics. This centre focuses on
research at the interface between Mathematics and Computer Science. It
has a staff of 60 researchers and faculty members. Dr. Morrison is a
cofounder and co-director of Grid-Ireland. Established in 1999, Grid-
Ireland is a participant in the "European Data Grid" and the "Establish
Grids for e-Science in Europe" projects. Currently it supports four virtual
organisations across 64 institutions on the island of Ireland.
Dr. Morrison is a Science Foundation of Ireland Investigator award
holder and has attracted more than Euro 20M in research funding since
1997. He is a member of many international programme committees and
is a founder of the International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed
Computing. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE.
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