Grant Holland pursued graduate work in mathematics at the University of Georgia, where he earned a masters degree in 1972. Since then, he has worked as a computer systems architect, software engineer and systems development methodologist for and with a number of computer manufacturers, including Sperry Univac, Cray Research, Unisys, Data General and Sun Microsystems.
Holland has designed and implemented several distributed operating infrastructure platforms. These platforms provided distributed communications and large-scale system homogeneity over an Internet infrastructure in order to support enterprise-class system architectures and applications. He has also worked with major customers of various enterprises to design and implement breakthrough computing designs. For example, he designed the prototype CPU sharing architecture for the initial Shuttle Mission Simulator for NASA at Johnson's Space Center in the early 1970s.
In the past decade, Holland worked on data center automation and cloud computing as principle engineer at Sun Microsystems. It became clear to him that large-scale enterprise and scientific computing operation centers were at risk of becoming too complex to be managed and evolved by human actors. This realization sent Holland on a search for system architectures that could achieve sustainability on their own. He saw the need for self-organizing, adaptive and self-sustaining system designs. This quest led him to dynamical systems theories, complex adaptive system theories and, in particular, nonlinear dynamics.
Holland then joined NuTech Solutions as vice president, product development and software engineering. There, he led the research to move mathematical modeling beyond the workstation and to integrate it directly with the information infrastructure of the scientific or business enterprise in a collaborative modeling environment.
This work led Holland to return to his quest to understand the inner workings of self-organizing, adaptive and self-sustaining system organization. But this time, he sought a mathematical foundation for these kinds of systems – and was led to the formulation of OCS as a stochastic dynamical complex adaptive systems theory.
In 2007, Holland met Bob Eisenstein, a nuclear and particle physicist, president emeritus of the Santa Fe Institute and senior alumnus of the National Science Foundation. Bob subsequently became interested in the work and encouraged Holland to pursue its development into a full-fledged dynamical systems theory. Since then, Bob has provided significant feedback, ideas, comments, suggestions and, especially, encouragement to Holland in the pursuit of this work.