Dear Rick,
It is my pleasure to give Ian Foster my enthusiastic unreserved recommendation 
for promotion to senior scientist. I know his work well through our interactions in CRPC 
research projects and participation in national meetings. I have also used his book 
"Designing and Building Parallel Programs". I would Argonne's MCS division as the 
premier HPCC research organization in the nation and Ian as your "crown-jewel". I 
would rate him as the equal of any computer scientist at his experience level in any 
university. I recommend him to any organization interested in HPCC, distributed 
computing or the experimental systems building approach to computer science.
Ian combines great intelligence, excellent communication skills and hard work. 
The latter is illustrated by his very productive career with a remarkable list of 
publications. His communication skills can be demonstrated with several examples. The 
current very interesting book on computational grids owes a lot to Ian's skills in bringing 
a lot of very good people together. Indeed the fact that so many world leaders in their 
specialty were willing to contribute, speaks directly to the universal respect with which 
he is held. Ian was very effective at the so-called PetaSoft meeting (summer 96), in 
coordinating a bunch of primadonnas and producing a report that was to most observers 
surprisingly interesting. His book "Designing and Building Parallel Programs" is very 
well written and I use it as a resource in my basic computational science course.
Of course Ian's talents are well represented by his papers. Globus is generally 
regarded as the most promising metacomputing system and Ian is viewed as a key 
(perhaps the key) leader of this effort. I am familiar with some of his earlier work such as 
Fortran M, which exhibits elegance in architecture and impressive software 
implementation.
I am happy to expand on these remarks if necessary. Ian has my strongest 
support!
Geoffrey Fox