Biographical sketches of authors

Andrew S. Grimshaw Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering, University of Virginia, 151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904 (grimshaw@cs.virginia.edu). Dr. Grimshaw received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois in 1988. He then joined the University of Virginia as an assistant professor of computer science and became an associate professor in 1994. He is the chief designer and architect of Mentat and Legion. Mentat is an object-oriented parallel processing system designed to simplify the task of writing parallel programs. Legion is a new collaborative project to realize the potential of the national information infrastructure (NII) by constructing a very large virtual computer that spans the nation. Legion addresses issues such as parallelism, fault tolerance, security, autonomy, heterogeneity, resource management, and access transparency in a multi-language environment. Dr. Grimshaw's research projects also include ELFS (extensible file systems), which addresses the I/O crisis brought on by parallel computers. He is the author or co-author of more than 50 publications and book chapters. In 2001, Dr. Grimshaw founded Avaki Corporation, which has commercialized grid technology.

Marty A. Humphrey Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering, University of Virginia, 151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904 (humphrey@cs.virginia.edu). Dr. Humphrey received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in 1996. After spending two years as an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Colorado, he joined the University of Virginia in 1998. His research focuses on operating-system support for parallel, distributed, and real-time computation. He has created a real-time threads package that features novel semantics for hard real-time computation. He has also created operating-system support for distributed soft real-time computation, such as multimedia applications, addressing the ability to write, analyze, and execute applications that explicitly and dynamically adjust to fluctuating resource availability. Dr. Humphrey's current work is on providing operating-system or middleware support for large, heterogeneous virtual machines in the context of the Legion project, focusing on the general issues of computer security, resource management, and application design.

Anand Natrajan Avaki Corporation, 15 New England Executive Park, Burlington, Massachusetts 01803 (anand@avaki.com). Dr. Anand received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Virginia in 2000. He continued at the University of Virginia as a research scientist with the Legion project for another two years. Currently, he works as a Senior Software Engineer on grid systems for Avaki Corporation. His research focuses on harnessing the power of distributed systems for user applications. He has written tools for scheduling, running, and monitoring large numbers of legacy parameter-space jobs on a grid and for browsing the resources of a grid. Currently, Dr. Anand is designing and deploying a Web services interface for grids. He has published several related papers and participated in several fora related to grids. Prior to joining the Legion project, he worked on multi-representation modeling for distributed interactive simulation. His doctoral thesis addressed the problem of maintaining consistency among multiple concurrent representations of entities being modeled. In addition to distributed systems, he is interested in computer architecture and information retrieval.