Dr. Francine Berman
Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Dr. Francine Berman is a pioneer in grid computing and a leader in the national effort to build a comprehensive modern cyberinfrastructure to support research in science and engineering.

Dr. Berman directs the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) whose mission is to innovate, develop and deploy technology to advance science and engineering. Dr. Berman also directs the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building a national infrastructure to improve and extend the reach of science and engineering.

In April 2003, Dr. Berman was appointed the first holder of the Endowed Chair in High Performance Computing at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering where she also serves as Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. She founded the UCSD Grid Computing Laboratory (now the Grid Research and Innovation Laboratory) and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

For over a decade, she has been a pioneer and international leader in the area of Grid Computing, the study of hardware, software and collaboration technologies that allow scientists to link computing and communication resources together to execute modern science and engineering applications. Grid Computing takes the Internet to the next step, allowing users to link sites as a platform for computation and data management, as well as to provide access to information. She is one of two principal investigators of the National Science Foundation-supported TeraGrid, the largest coordinated Grid deployment project to date.

Her academic research during the past two decades has focused on Grid and high-performance computing, in particular in the areas of programming environments, adaptive middleware, scheduling, and performance prediction. Most recently, she has led or co-led the AppLeS (Application-Level Scheduling) Project, the design and development of adaptive middleware for Grid environments, and the large NSF "Virtual Instrument/MCell" Information Technology Research project. Her leadership, research, extensive collaborations, and successful students have led to significant advances in High Performance and Grid Computing. As a result, Dr. Berman was recognized by the editors of BusinessWeek magazine in May 2004 as one of the top women in technology.

In her roles as university professor, SDSC Director, NPACI Director, and TeraGrid PI, Dr. Berman provides leadership and vision for a broad set of international initiatives in Grid and High Performance Computing and continues to make both deep and broad contributions to modern science and technology.