William E. Johnston

Bio

William E. (Bill) Johnston is a Senior Scientist and advisor to the US Dept. of Energy, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) (www.es.net) in the Computational Research Division of the Computing Sciences Directorate of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Bill was the ESnet Department Head from Oct. 2003 to Oct. 2008, when he retired. (ESnet is the wide area network that serves the science facilities of the US Dept. of Energy's Office of Science.) During his tenure leading ESnet Bill undertook a complete reanalysis of the requirements of DOE's Office of Science programs that ESnet supports. This resulted in 5 and 10 year network usage projections that were far in excess of the capacity available in the 2003 configuration of ESnet. Bill then led the effort to develop a new network architecture and implementation that would accommodate the massive data flows of science as typified by the movement of petabytes/year from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to several ESnet sites for storage and processing and then to a collection of universities for analysis. The new network design entailed a multiple ring, dual core, national network. One core was primarily oriented toward commodity IP traffic and the other - 20 Gb/s (in 2008) growing to 50 Gb/s (in 2010) - was a virtual circuit-oriented network designed to handle the massive data flows of large-scale instrument-based science such as the LHC. This new design was shepherded through several review cycles and the funding process. The new network (www.es.net/ESnet4) was funded in 2006. A partnership was established with Internet2 to share a national optical infrastructure, and a seven year agreement was negotiated for the many 10 Gb/s optical circuits that are the foundation of ESnet4. The new network was built by ESnet's highly competent staff in 2007 and 2008, and by late 2008 some 125 10Gb/s optical circuits were in use around the country.

Prior to joining ESnet, Bill's long time research interests included high-speed, wide area network based, distributed systems, widely distributed computational and data "Grids," Public-Key Infrastructure based security and authorization systems, and use of the global Internet to enable remote access to scientific, analytical, and medical instrumentation.

Other professional activities have included establishing the Distributed Systems Department and serving as Dept. Head for several years (now the Advanced Computing for Science Dept. headed by Deb Agarwal) and being Principal Investigator for several DOE Office of Science projects related to the application of computing in science environments. Bill is also co-founder (with Ian Foster and Charlie Catlett) of the Grid Forum (which merged with the European Grid Forum to form the Global Grid Forum, and has since merged with the equivalent industry group to become the Open Grid Forum).

Bill has worked in the field of computing and its support of the classical sciences for 40 years. He has taught computer science at the under graduate and graduate levels. He has a Masters Degree in Mathematics and Physics from San Francisco State University. Bill may be reached at wej@es.net. For more information see www.dsd.lbl.gov/~wej.

Summer, 2009