News Archive, January 2023

Prof. Ian Foster on laying the groundwork for cloud computing

January 03, 2023   |  UChicago News

Ian Foster is widely considered the founder of grid computing, the precursor to cloud computing. Over the course of his career, Foster has been a pioneer in the computer sciences. In the mid-1990s, Foster and Carl Kesselman, a professor at the University of Southern California, created what came to be known as grid computing. It helped meet enormous new needs for computing power and data driven initially by the needs of scientific research. They also created the technologies that laid the groundwork for the multibillion-dollar cloud computing industry.