BRIAN W. UNGER

Education

B.Sc. (1963) Loyola University, Los Angeles

M.Sc. (1965) University of Southern California

Ph.D. (1972) University of California, San Diego

 

Present Positions

Executive Director, Grid Research Centre

Professor, Department of Computer Science

 

Key Words

Simulation, network and Internet modeling,

parallel and distributed simulation,   

 

 

 

Brian Unger is the Executive Director of the Grid Research Centre and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  He was the founding President and CEO of iCORE, the "informatics Circle of Research Excellence", from 1999 though 2004.  iCORE  is a not-for-profit corporation that funds research in the information and communication sciences at Alberta universities.  Under his leadership, iCORE funded 17 Chairs and Professors whose research teams now include over 500 faculty, post doctoral fellows, research staff and graduate students working in targeted areas within the communication networks, nano-informatics, and intelligent software systems areas.

Dr. Unger was the founding president of Netera Alliance, a research consortium aimed at advanced computing and networking, and was the founding Board Chair of C3.ca, a consortium of over 30 universities, corporations and government agencies that is aimed at building Canada's infrastructure in high performance computation. He was the founder of Jade Simulations International, a private for-profit corporation, and served as its President and CEO for five years, from 1988 until returning to the university in 1993. 

He currently co-leads the Grid Research Centre and TeleSim with Dr. Rob Simmonds, the Research Director of these projects.  He is a co-principal investigator of WestGrid, a $50 million regional advanced computing infrastructure project involving five universities in Alberta and British Columbia.  Dr. Simmonds is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary and is the WestGrid Chief Technical Officer. 

The TeleSim project has been focused on the parallel and distributed simulation of advanced Internet architectures and protocols that recently led to the creation of the Grid Research Centre (GRC) in collaboration with the Hewlett Packard Palo Alto research labs.  The GRC is focused on the collection of distributed performance data and on the management of access to massive data sets.

Dr. Unger received the 2004 IWAY Public Leadership award for his outstanding contributions to Canada’Äôs information society.  He received the 1993 ASTech award for research in parallel and distributed simulation.