Ron Perrott is a Visiting Professor at the Oxford e-Research Centre. He has a long established and well documented record of research in the areas of software engineering, distributed and parallel systems and operating systems and authored/edited five books on these topics as well as founded the Journal of Scientific Programming. His current research interests are based on parallel and distributed computing and cloud/grid computing.

From 2000 to 2008 he was Director of the Belfast e-Science Centre a Centre which engaged in cloud/grid middleware and application development and had a wide range of projects with both academia and industry. It deployed the world’s first media grid in conjunction with BBC Research and Development, as well as developing grids for finance, life sciences, military and data mining applications.

He was a founding member of UK Computing Research Committee and a member of two HEFCE Research Assessment Panels as well as the HEFCE Teaching Quality Assessment Exercise.  For six years he Chaired the RCUK’s High End Computing Strategy Committee which advised the UK’s Research Councils on strategic issues and policy initiatives in high performance computing and before that Chairman of the Technology Watch Panel in High End Computing.  He has led two UK Delegations to US and one to China and Japan developing the topics of HPC and Grid computing and among other things negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding between EPSRC and the US NSF.

He was one of the two EPSRC representatives appointed to the OST’s Informatics Committee to scope out the UK’s e-Science initiative in both content and finance; a member of the RCUK e-Science Steering Committee and the e-Science Technical Advisory Group and a member of EPSRC e-Science SAT.  In Europe he has held several positions, for example, Chair of the Information Society Monitoring Panel and Chair of the Committee on Grid Computing. In 2006 he was the leader of an EU group which developed a Roadmap and Vision for Software Services throughout the European Union. In the US he has been a member of several NSF Panels, in particular, the eXtreme Digital cyber infrastructure panel.

In 1994 he received the British Computer Society’s NI IT Professional of the Year Award for services to the software industry. He was Chairman, Board of Directors, Optima Numerics a University spin off company developing and promoting software products in the international market, a Director of Momentum and a Director of the Institute of Software Engineering Institute set up by the Government to promote software technology transfer; a Director of EoverI Ltd developing cloud computing software and applications.

In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of US Association of Computing Machinery for contributions towards the understanding of software for parallel computers and in 2000 elected a Fellow of the IEEE.  He has served as a Member and then Chair of the ACM Fellows Awards Committee; a Committee which recognises and honours outstanding achievements among members.  He is Editor in Chief of the ACM International Conference Proceeding Series which enables conferences and workshops to cost effectively produce print proceedings for their attendees, and dissemination the material through the ACM Digital Library.

He was a founder member of the ACM SIGHPC [High Performance Computing] and is a member of their Advisory Board; the first international group in that topic within a major professional society. He is a member of the ACM Heidelberg Laureate Forum which convenes the Turing, Fields, and Abel Prize honourees together with young computer science researchers; competitively selected from a large field of candidates.  The SC [Supercomputing and Networking] conference series is one of the major conferences sponsored by ACM.  He is member of the SC Steering Committee and has held a number of posts over the last twenty years, in particular, Chair of the International Program which saw international involvement in the conference increase by 30 %.

He has been a consultant for strategic IT national development for a large number of countries including UK, US, France, Portugal, Norway, Costa Rica, Colombia, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Colombia, European Union, Latvia etc. providing him with a wide appreciation of international IT strategies and developments.

Previous positions:

University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

NASA Ames Research Center, California, USA

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Institute for Informatics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Dept. d'Informatique, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Queen’s University, Belfast, UK

Publications

R Perrott, T Harmer and R Lewis e-Science Infrastructure for Digital Media Broadcasting. IEEE Computer 41(11),2008,  pp67-72

T Harmer, P Wright, C Cunningham, J Hawkins, R Perrott An application-centric model for cloud management, IEEE Services 2010

YL Sun, R Perrott, T Harmer, C Cunningham, P Wright An SLA Focused Financial Services Infrastructure, Proceedings of the International Conference on Cloud Computing & Virtualization 2010 CCV 2010

YL Sun, R Perrott, T Harmer, C Cunningham, P Wright, J Kennedy, A Edmonds, V Bayon, J Maza, G Berginc, P Hadalinz SLA-Aware Resource Management, Grids and Service-Oriented Architectures for Service Level Agreements

YL Sun, R Perrott, T Harmer, C Cunningham, P Wright, J Kennedy, A Edmonds, V Bayon, J Maza, G Berginc, P Hadalinz SLA-Aware Resource Management, Service Level Agreements in Grids Workshop 2009, October 13, 2009, Banff, Canada.

T Harmer, P Wright, C Cunningham and R Perrott Provider-independent use of the cloud, EuroPar’09, 2009 pp454-465

T Harmer, A Stewart, M Clint, P Kilpatrick, RH Perrott, J Gabarró Assessing the Reliability and Cost of Web and Grid Orchestrations, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, ARES        2008, March 4-7, 2008, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona , Spain. IEEE Computer Society 2008, 428-433

R Perrott, S Wasnik, T Harmer, P Donachy, A Carson, P Wright, J Hawkins, C Cunningham Self Managing Middleware for Dynamic Grids. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4459, Springer 2007, pp286-297, ISBN 978-3-540-72359-2.

(T Harmer, P Donachy and R Perrott Finance Sector: Requirements for High Assurance within Spatial SOA Based Grid Infrastructures, Tenth IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE 2007), November 14-16, 2007, Dallas, Texas, USA. IEEE Computer Society, pp387-388.

T Harmer, A Stewart, J Gabarró, M Clint, P Kilpatrick, RH. Perrott Managing Grid Computations: An ORC-Based Approach, Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications, 4th International Symposium, ISPA 2006, Sorrento, Italy, December 4-6, 2006, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4330, , Springer 2006, ISBN 3-540-68067-5, pp278-291

T Harmer, A Stewart, J Gabarró, M Clint, P Kilpatrick, RH. Perrott Estimating the reliability of Web and Grid Orchestrations. Proceedings of the CoreGRID Integration Workshop, Krakow. S Gorlatch, M Brubak, T Priol (Eds.), pp. 141-152. ISBN: 83-915141-6-1. 19-20 October 2006