'Globus Toolkit' wins special honors
at R&D 100 Award ceremony

ARGONNE, Ill. (Oct. 18, 2002) – The Globus Toolkit, high-performance computing technology developed at Argonne and the University of Southern California, was chosen the best of the best at the annual "R&D 100 Awards" presentation Oct. 16.

The toolkit was named the most promising technology development of the year by the magazine, which covers research and development for the business community. The software, along with two other Argonne technologies, had earlier been named one of R&D's "100 most significant technical products of the year." The special award was announced during the awards presentation at Navy Pier.

The Globus Toolkit is an open architecture, open-source set of software services and libraries that support computational "grids," allowing computers far apart to work on the same problem at the same time. The toolkit is central to distributed computing, one of the hottest topics in information technology. The New York Times recently called the Globus software the "de facto standard" for grid computing.

Since its 1996 inception, the project has been dedicated to the open-source philosophy of sharing resources to maximize progress and community benefits. The toolkit – which includes software services and libraries for resource monitoring, discovery, and management, plus security and file management – is now central to science and engineering projects that total nearly a half-billion dollars internationally, and it is the substrate on which many companies are building significant commercial Grid products.

Eight firms – Compaq, Cray, SGI, Sun, Veridian, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC – are developing an optimized form of the toolkit for their operating platforms as a path toward secure, distributed, multi-vendor grid computing. Three other companies – Entropia, IBM, and Microsoft – are expanding their previous commitments to the Globus Project. Platform Computing has released a commercially supported version of the toolkit.

IBM has since joined in development of the next-generation Globus Toolkit 3.0, to be based on Open Grid Services Architecture specifications being drafted by Argonne and IBM.

The Globus Project is led by Ian Foster and Steve Tuecke of Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division and Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.

Argonne National Laboratory brings the world's brightest scientists and engineers together to find exciting and creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

For more information, please contact Dave Jacqué (630/252-5582 or info@anl.gov) at Argonne.