Charlie Catlett

Charlie Catlett is a Senior Fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory, Executive Director of the TeraGrid project, Chair of Global Grid Forum, and the Director of the I-WIRE optical network consortium.

Charlie was network architect in the original TeraGrid proposal and became Executive Director when funding was awarded in late 2000. TeraGrid is a 90M dollar NSF-funded project that is deploying a 25 Teraflops computational Grid system integrating resources at Argonne, Caltech, NCSA, PSC, and SDSC.

Since 1999 Charlie has chaired the Global Grid Forum, a rapidly growing middleware standards body with over 50 working groups and research groups developing specifications, best practices, and informational documents for Grid computing. The several thousand GGF participants come from over 30 countries and some 400 organizations. As GGF's first chair, Charlie led the development of GGF's processes, organization, governance, and culture and established a not-for-profit company to support GGF's activities. GGF is currently supported by over 50 companies and 30 laboratories and universities through a sponsorship program Charlie created. Charlie also serves as editor of the GGF document series, modeled after the IETF's RFC series.

In 1999 Charlie became Director of the I-WIRE project, a 12M dollar dark fiber and WDM transport network initiative that has deployed an optical network among 10 sites in the Chicago area. I-WIRE provides dark fiber and lambda services to projects including Starlight, the 40 Gb/s NSF TeraGrid Backplane network, and the NSF-funded Optiputer project.

Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Charlie was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). With Larry Smarr, Charlie co-authored a seminal paper in 1992, "Metacomputing," in the Communications of the ACM, which contributed to the concept of Grid computing. That same year Charlie's paper "In Search of Gigabit Applications," published in IEEE Network, received the Fred W. Ellersick award for best paper in an IEEE journal. His most recent publication is "Standards for Grid Computing: Global Grid Forum," in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Grid Computing.