ESnet Policy Board Holds Inaugural Meeting at Berkeley Lab

From left to right: Larry Smarr, Jagdeep Singh, David Foster, Vinton Cerf, Cees de Laat, Kristin Rauschenbach, and David Clark. Photo by Roy Kaltscmidt.

This month the ESnet Policy Board held its first annual meeting at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The seven-member board was created last summer to provide scientific and executive-level advice to the Laboratory’s Director regarding the overall ESnet program. The Policy Board focuses on specific issues such as resource utilization to maximize the present and future scientific impact of ESnet and long-range planning for the program, including research and development necessary for future capabilities.

In his charge to the policy board, Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos sought input on ESnet's strategy for data intensive science, its potential for expanded services leveraging its recent stimulus investment, and its approach to applied research, development and innovation.To give the board members context for their input, ESnet staff gave four presentations about the organization, its mission, accomplishments, support for data-intensive science, capabilities and services, and potential areas for research and development. The sessions included specific questions and engaging discussions between presenters and board members.

Policy Board members are:

• Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.
• David Clark is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Since the mid 1970s, Clark has been leading the development of the Internet.
• David Foster is head of the Communications and Network Group at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where he is responsible for all the electronic communications of the laboratory. Educated as a physicist, he also holds an MBA and has been widely published in computer science journals and related publications.
• Cees de Laat is Professor and leader of the System and Network Engineering Science group at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is co-founder and organizer of several of the past meetings of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) and founding member of CineGrid.org.
• Kristin Rauschenbach is Vice President and Department Head of the Disruptive Information Processing Technologies group at BBN Technologies, and serves as the Substrate Architect for the GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) Project Office. She was previously co-founder and CEO of PhotonEx and Associate Division Head at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.
• Jagdeep Singh is the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Infinera, where he also served as President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director. He is a member of the Advisory Council at Stanford Graduate School of Business and was previously president and general manager of CIENA Corporation’s Core Switching Division.
• Larry Smarr, founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California San Diego and UC Irvine. Previously Smarr was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.