Alan Sill (Texas Tech University)

Dr. Alan Sill is currently Senior Scientist at the High Performance Computing Center and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Texas Tech University, and serves as Vice President of Standards for the Open Grid Forum. He is an internationally recognized expert on advanced scientific computing systems and software, and has played a strong role in many distributed computing, cloud and grid development projects and associated standards efforts.

Dr. Sill has coordinated large-scale software development projects for grid, cloud and distributed computing over more than three decades, including database and data access systems for high energy physics experiments and creation of large-scale, multi-user computational resources for such experiments. He earned his Bachelors degree from Lewis and Clark College in Physics and Mathematics in 1977, and after two years in industry in the Research Division at Rockwell International, went on to earn his Ph.D in Particle Physics from The American University in 1987. He held positions as a Research Associate, Senior Research Associate and Texas National Laboratory Research Commission SSC National Fellow at the University of Rochester from 1986-1992, during which time his work focused on high energy physics and computational development topics at the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics in Japan, the Superconducting Super Collider design project and the Collider Detector at Fermilab in the USA.

Dr. Sill came to Texas Tech in 1992 as Assistant Professor of Physics, holding the positions of Associate Professor (1997-2000) and Research Professor (2000-2005) in the Physics Department before joining the TTU High Performance Computing Center in 2005. His scientific research during this period spanned a range of topics in high energy particle physics, scientific computing, and cosmic ray and particle physics detector development. In addition to his work in distributed computing, he was deeply involved in silicon detector development and design for the Collider Detector at Fermilab, in related electronics fabrication, testing and development, and in data analysis related to the discovery of the top quark in 1995 by the CDF and DZero collaborations. He is an author on nearly 400 peer-reviewed publications covering topics in particle and nuclear physics, scientific computation, cosmic ray and radioisotope analysis, and has organized conferences on cosmic ray detectors, grid and cloud computing, and authentication technologies.

Dr. Sill has held official formal visiting positions as Guest Scientist in the Computing Division at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (1992-1993 and 1999), Visiting Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1998 and 1999, joint with Fermilab), Research Associate at the University of Glasgow (2002) and Research Scientist at the University of Chicago Enrico Fermi Institute (2005). Dr. Sill is a past member of the SLAC E-136 and E-139, AMY, ACCESS and CDF high energy physics collaborations, and a current member of the Compact Muon Solenoid and RD52 (DREAM) experimental teams at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN).

Dr. Sill participated in the formation of several large-scale computing efforts, including the Open Science Grid (OSG), Southeastern Universities Research Association SURAgrid, and Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE) projects. He is a charter and current member of The Americas Grid Policy Management Authority, the arm of the International Grid Trust Federation responsible for accreditation of grid credential authorities for North, South and Central America. He has also served as a member of other international standards bodies, including working groups on grid security, middleware development, authentication and authorization, and remote collaboration. His hobbies include hiking and climbing, outdoor pursuits and observational astronomy.