Bill Johnston, one of the nation's leading developers of widely distributed systems, is head of NERSC's new Distributed Systems Department.

Expanding the capabilities of the DOE Science Grid Testbed will be the focus of NERSC's new Distributed Systems Department, which joined the NERSC Division in early 2000 as part of the reorganization of Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Directorate.

The Science Grid will provide significant new capabilities to scientists and engineers, allowing them to address complex and large-scale computing and data analysis problems beyond what is possible today. The Distributed Systems Department will conduct research and development into various components of the Science Grid infrastructure, including collaboratory tools, computer security, distributed data intensive computing, and networking.