Carl Kesselman

Title: Director of the Center for Grid Technologies at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute; Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at USC
Academic Credentials: B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University at Buffalo; M.S., Electrical Engineering, USC; and Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles
Favorite Junk Food: Beer and spicy Buffalo chicken wings
Most Productive Time Of Day: 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., when there's a deadline

arl Kesselman and Ian Foster plan to change the way you work.

As co-founders of the eight-year-old Globus Project, the two scientists lead research that enables grid computing, an architecture that links distributed resources such as high-end computers, networks and databases. The primary manifestation of the project's work is the Globus Toolkit, open-source middleware used by IBM, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.

For Kesselman, grid computing is mostly about improving collaboration. "It's just really hard and awkward to collaborate, and when we do, we do it in an impoverished way because we can't take all of our support and all of our IT with us. And grids will fundamentally change that," he says.

Grid computing is the future of IT, echoes Gregory Maisel, director of business strategy at Applied IT Solutions, a Frisco, Texas, solution provider. "Now organizations that really need some heavy iron will be able to reduce costs because they will only pay for it when they need it," Maisel says.