Charlie Catlett has spent most of his career working with the country's most sophisticated supercomputers, as well as pioneering grid computing. On May 1, 2007, Catlett became CIO and division director of Argonne National Laboratory's Computing and Information Systems Division, a scientific research center funded by the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Science and managed by the University of Chicago. Since 1990, Argonne has worked with more than 600 companies, many federal agencies, and other organizations in areas ranging from climatology to biotechnology.

His routine CIO responsibilities include managing the IT group that maintains the laboratory and business computing and scientific network infrastructure. Because of his technical background, Catlett also serves on the scientific computing leadership team, which is turning out plans and strategy for the Digital Laboratory. This new initiative takes a Web-services and a services-oriented-architecture approach to the information infrastructure.

The Digital Laboratory is based on the concept of adopting the technology to the user, not the other way around. In fact, the science gateway, which Catlett worked on before becoming CIO, mirrors this philosophy. Catlett also will continue to work with the TeraGrid Project in a strategic advisory role and as chairman of the TeraGrid leadership forum. TeraGrid is a $90 million National Science Foundation-funded project that is deploying 25 teraflops computational grid system integrating resources at Argonne, California Institute of Technology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and other institutions. He most recently was director of the TeraGrid Project, which has about 4,000 users.

One of Catlett's upcoming projects is to buy a 3D Second Life island and host virtual training sessions for scientists. In fact, he is no stranger to the first-generation of Internet-based virtual worlds, called "multi-oriented objects (MOOs)" and "multi-user domains (MUDs)." The culture at Argonne, says Catlett, has evolved around using MOOs and MUDs for collaborating with colleagues. The advantage of collaboration in Second Life, says Catlett, is that everyone can see what you're doing – in real time.

Resources

The  ACM Digital Library

Presentation:  "TeraGrid Architecture"

Argonne National  Laboratory

Bio

Charlie Catlett is chief information officer at Argonne National Laboratory, director of the Computing and Information Systems Division, and a senior fellow in the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. From 2004-2007, he was director of the TeraGrid Project.

Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was chief technology officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was part of the original team that established NCSA in 1985. His early work at NCSA included participation on the team that deployed and managed the NSFNet.

Catlett was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum (now Open Grid Forum) from 1999 through 2004. While there, he designed and deployed one of the first regional optical networks dedicated to academic and research use. He has been involved in grid computing since the early 1990s, when he co-authored with Larry Smarr a seminal paper called "Metacomputing" in the Communications of the ACM, which outlined many of the high-level goals.

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Producer
Dana  Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom  Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host