"Nothing is real, everything is virtual."

Andrew Grimshaw
Professor of Computer Science

Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Virginia
151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4740

Phone: (434) 982-2204
Fax: (434) 982-2214
Email: grimshaw@cs.virginia.edu
Office: 236C Olsson Hall, UVa

Home page of Andrew Grimshaw

Areas of Interest

Grid computing, high-performance parallel computing, compilers for parallel systems, operating systems

Biographical Sketch

ndrew Grimshaw received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988. He then joined the University of Virginia as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, and became Associate Professor in 1994 and Professor in 1999. He is the chief designer and architect of Mentat and Legion. In 1999 he co-founded Avaki Corporation, and served as its Chairman and Chief Technical Officer, until 2005 when Avaki was acquired by Sybase. In 2003 he won the Frost and Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Andrew is a member of the Global Grid Forum (GGR) Steering Committee and the Architecture Area Director in the GGF. He has served on the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) Executive Committee, the DoD MSRC Programming Environments and Training (PET) Executive Committee, the CESDIS Science Council, the NRC Review Panel for Information Technology, and the Board on Assessment of NIST Programs. He is the author or co-author of over 50 publications and book chapters.

Research

rimshaw anticipated that gigabit networks will make possible the realization of very large nationwide virtual computers comprised of a variety of geographically distributed high-performance machines and workstations. To realize the potential of the physical infrastructure, software must be developed that is easy to use, supports large degrees of parallelism in applications code, and manages the complexity of the underlying physical system for the user. Grimshaw's early research projects include Mentat and ELFS. Mentat was an early object-oriented parallel processing system designed to simplify the task of writing parallel programs. ELFS (Extensible File Systems) addresses the I/O crisis brought on by parallel computers. These projects laid the foundation for the creation of Legion, a collaborative project to realize the potential of the NII by constructing a very large virtual computer that spans the globe. Legion addresses issues such as parallelism, fault-tolerance, security, autonomy, heterogeneity, resource management, and access transparency in a multi-language environment. The Legion project helped set the standards for current Grid Computing research, and has also formed the technological basis of Avaki Corporation (now merged with Sybase).

Selected Publications

Legion: Lessons Learned Building a Grid Operating System, A. S. Grimshaw and A. Natrajan, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 93, number 3, March, 2005, pp. 589-603.

A Philosophical and Technical Comparison of Legion and Globus, A. S. Grimshaw, A. Natrajan, and M. A. Humphrey, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 48, no. 2, March, 2004, pp. 233-254.

Studying Protein Folding on the Grid: Experiences Using CHARMM on NPACI Resources Under Legion, Natrajan, A., Crowley, M., Wilkins-Diehr, N., Humphrey, M. A., Fox, A. D., Grimshaw, A. S., and Brooks, C. L. III, in Grid Computing Environments 2004, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, vol. 16, no. 4, 2004, pp. 385-397.

Avaki Data Grid - Secure Transparent Access to Data, Andrew Grimshaw, in Grid Computing: A Practical Guide To Technology And Applications, Ahmar Abbas, editor, Charles River Media, 2003.

Grid Resource Management in Legion, A. Natrajan, M. A. Humphrey, and A. S. Grimshaw, in for Grid Resource Management: State of the Art and Future Trends, Jarek Nabrzyski, Jennifer M. Schopf, and Jan Weglarz (editors), 2003, pp. 145-160.

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