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Ben Segal (computer scientist)

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Ben Segal in 2014 at the Internet Hall of Fame Induction.

Ben Segal (born 19 May 1937 in Tel Aviv) is a British-Swiss computer scientist. He is known for his role as an Internet promoter.[1]

Biography

He attended William Hulme’s Grammar School, Manchester, and then Imperial College, London, graduating with a bachelor of science in physics and mathematics in 1958.[2]

Segal worked from 1958–1962 for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Industrial Division, in Risley, on fast breeder reactor development. He then moved to Detroit, Michigan, USA, to work on the Enrico Fermi fast breeder project from 1962–1965, and then to Stanford University in California for a PhD in mechanical and nuclear engineering (1966-1971). His thesis was on “Shock wave structure using nonlinear model Boltzmann equations” under the supervision of Joel H. Ferziger.[3][4]

In July 1971 he returned to Europe and worked as a systems programmer and later as a computer networking specialist at CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Apart from a sabbatical year in 1977 working at the Bell Northern Research laboratory in Palo Alto, California, he stayed at CERN until his retirement in 2002.

Between 1985 and 1988 he co-ordinated the introduction at CERN of the TCP/IP Internet protocols, permitting interconnection of the principal computer systems inside the laboratory before CERN joined the world Internet in early 1989.[5][6][7][8][9][10]

From 1989 he played a major role in the project “SHIFT” that replaced CERN’s mainframe computers by distributed Unix clusters.[11][12][13] Segal was responsible for the system’s high performance computer network. By the year 2000, SHIFT had already increased CERN’s installed computing power by a factor of a hundred. The SHIFT architecture was then extended to build the World Wide LHC Computing Grid, used since that time to analyse the massive and still increasing amounts of experimental data taken by the physics experiments around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. In 2001 CERN was awarded the Computerworld Honors award for 21st Century Achievement for for this innovative application of information technology to the benefit of society.[14][15][16]

Since his retirement, Segal has remained active as an honorary member of the CERN personnel. He has worked in the developing field of volunteer computing where the general public is invited to contribute to major scientific computing challenges by volunteering some of their private computing power. Segal co-founded and is still active in CERN’s own such project, LHC@home,[17][18] which has attracted several hundred thousand contributors since its launch in 2004.[19][20]

Awards and honors

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Ben Segal". Internet Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  2. ^ Society, Internet (2014-07-02). "How the Web Got its 'Lingua Franca'". Internet Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  3. ^ Segal, Ben Maurice (1971). Shock wave structure using nonlinear model Boltzmann equations (Thesis).
  4. ^ Segal, Ben M.; Ferziger, Joel H. (1972-07-01). "Shock-Wave Structure using Nonlinear Model Boltzmann Equations". The Physics of Fluids. 15 (7): 1233–1247. doi:10.1063/1.1694072. ISSN 0031-9171.
  5. ^ Gillies, James; Cailliau, R. (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. pp. 83–90. ISBN 978-0-19-286207-5.
  6. ^ Liyanage, Shantha; Nordberg, Markus; Streit-Bianchi, Marilena (2024-06-05). Big Science, Innovation, and Societal Contributions: The Organisations and Collaborations in Big Science Experiments. Oxford University Press. p. 266. ISBN 978-0-19-888119-3.
  7. ^ Sayeed, Ahmed (2019-09-24). You Could Be the Winner (Volume - II). Sankalp Publication. p. 143. ISBN 978-93-88660-66-2.
  8. ^ Brown, Ian (2013-01-01). Research Handbook on Governance of the Internet. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84980-504-9.
  9. ^ Segal, Ben (1995), A short history of Internet protocols at CERN, Geneva: CERN, doi:10.17181/CERN_TCP_IP_history, retrieved 2024-04-26
  10. ^ "Internet prehistory at CERN". CERN. 2024-04-10. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  11. ^ "Enormer Schub". Der Spiegel (in German). 1992-07-05. ISSN 2195-1349. Retrieved 2024-04-28.
  12. ^ Segal, Ben (2001), "A major SHIFT in outlook", CERN Courier, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 19–20, retrieved 2024-04-28
  13. ^ Baud, J P; Bunn, J J; Cane, F; Foster, D; Hemmer, F; Jagel, E; Lee, G; Robertson, L; Segal, B; Trannoy, A; Zacharov, I E (1991). "SHIFT: the scalable heterogeneous integrated facility for HEP computing". Workshop on detector and event simulation in high energy physics : Monte Carlo '91, 8–12 Apr 1991, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: 41–56.
  14. ^ The Computerworld Honors Program: The laureate (PDF). 2009.
  15. ^ "CERN computing wins top award". CERN Courier. 41 (7): 8. 2001.
  16. ^ "Prestigious US award for CERN computing". CERN. 2024-04-10. Retrieved 2024-04-26.
  17. ^ "History | LHC@home". lhcathome.web.cern.ch. Retrieved 2024-04-28.
  18. ^ "History of LHC@home". LHC@home. Archived from the original on 22 June 2007.
  19. ^ Dance, Amber (2007-12-01). "Computers take on more than aliens | symmetry magazine". www.symmetrymagazine.org. Retrieved 2024-04-29.
  20. ^ Regina, Lenart-Gansiniec (2018-08-17). Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Management in Contemporary Business Environments. IGI Global. pp. 189–194. ISBN 978-1-5225-4201-8.
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