Contact Details

Computational and Information Sciences, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, PO Box 999, MS: K7-90, Richland, WA, 99352, USA

Visiting Fellow, School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney.

email

ski blog

wine and food blog

I'm an Associate Division Director in Computational Sciences and Math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I am also the Chief Architect for PNNL’s Data Intensive Computing Initiative , a member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society.

Essential Software Architecture

Until July 2006, I led the software architecture R&D at National ICT Australia (NICTA) in Sydney, Australia. While at NICTA, I wrote a book – Essential Software Architecture. A sample chapter is available below:

Chapter 1  – Understanding Software Architecture

I've also developed some  teaching materials to support the book – please email me if you’re interested in receiving the PowerPoint version.  

Data Intensive Computing with MeDICi 

Our MeDICi Integration Framework (MIF) is now available for download from here. It's based on the Mule ESB platform, and gives a Java-based API for easily creating distributed data processing pipelines that integrate codes written in any programming language. Some links to papers on our work in data intensive computing are:

Data Intensive Computing in the 21st Century

The MeDICi Integration Framework: A Platform for High Performance Data Streaming Applications

Software Architecture Challenges for Data Intensive Computing

Recent Papers

Here's some links to recent papers in the areas of:

Performance Analysis and Prediction for Middleware and Component Based Applications

Software Architecture Knowledge Management

Adaptive Software Architectures

Real Programmers Articles

I've always been a devotee of Ed Post's 'Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal' article. I wrote a follow-up in 1995, and decided to update this recently. It'll appear in the September 2008 edition of IEEE Computer.

In anticipation of the sorts of emails I received in 1995 from some humorless folks, here's the full 'bio' that I wanted on the article :)

Nowadays Ian Gorton writes more words than code. But he relies every day on the real programmers he works with at Pacific Northwest National Lab to translate all sorts of wacky ideas into useful software systems. In the past he has worked extensively with the DCE and CORBA, designed software processes, been a member of an Empirical Software Engineering group, and written many papers that no one has read (including one on agents). He also greatly bemoans the lack of humor and self-deprecation in Computer Science!

Out of the office ...

I also like to have fun outside work ... and I ramble on about it in my blogs. Read at your peril :-}