Dane Skow |
Twenty-two years ago, Dane Skow arrived at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as a graduate student and was immediately put to work building a front-end electronics system for a new high energy physics experiment. Skow eventually completed his Ph.D. and chose to stay at Fermilab, where he became increasingly involved with computer science, and eventually, grid computing and the Open Science Grid.
"I tell people that I am following the electrons upstream from the particle detectors," said Skow. "First it was the electronics close to the detector, then the data acquisition, then analysis farms, systems design and now administration. I've finally reached the edge of the Fermilab site, and it's time to go further."
Three weeks from now Skow will say goodbye to Fermilab and take up a joint appointment with Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago as Deputy Director of the TeraGrid Grid Infrastructure Group.
As the field of high energy physics became involved with grid computing as a way to enable its large, distributed collaborations to participate in large, specialized experiments, so did Skow. He took on leadership roles, first as part of the Particle Physics Data Grid and more recently in the OSG, placing a special emphasis on interoperability between the different grids. He will continue to work toward interoperability in his new position, along with coordinating the TeraGrid network, helpdesk, operations, software kit and acting as a liaison to TeraGrid users.
"I think there's a natural synergy between TeraGrid and the OSG," Skow explained. "TeraGrid is very strong on resource providers, and the OSG is built from the user communities. Hooking the two of them together helps all of us."
The change from Fermilab physicist to University of Chicago computational scientist will
leave much the same for Skow—he'll still be doing plenty of videoconferencing, lots
of traveling, and will only have to drive about 10 minutes farther from home to get to
work every morning. He'll also continue to work to bring the TeraGrid, the OSG and other
worldwide grids together to serve an ever-widening variety of scientific users, reaching
for the ultimate goal of one worldwide grid system.
"At the beginning of the Internet, there were scads of smaller projects, and we really cared about which one we were joining," said Skow. "Specialized networks still exist, but the choice of which one to join is more to optimize performance than functionality. We should look forward to the day when the grid gets to that level—that will be true success."
—Katie Yurkewicz
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