Three Argonne technologies
win R&D 100 awards
Three technologies developed or co-developed at Argonne National Laboratory are among the winners of this year's R&D 100 awards, given annually by R&D magazine to the "100 most significant technical products of the year."
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Argonne's winning technologies are the Smart Sensor Developer Kit, the Advanced Electro-deionization for Product Desalting and the Globus Toolkit™.
The Smart Sensor Developer Kit is a development system to help incorporate miniature chemical sensors into experimental instrumentation. Developers are Michael Vogt, Laura Skubal and Erika Shoemaker (formerly) of Argonne and John Ziegler of General Atomics Corp., San Diego, Calif. The research is highlighted earlier in this issue of logos: Microelectronic nose detects and recognizes gases to save lives.
The Advanced Electrodeionization for Product Desalting is an environmentally friendly technology for removing salt impurities and other byproducts from finished products. Developers are Michael Henry, Paula Moon, Yupo Lin, Carl Landahl, James R. Frank, and Seth Snyder, all of Argonne, Shih-Perng Tsai, formerly of Argonne, and Rathin Datta and Dennis Burke of EDSEP, Inc., Mount Prospect, Ill. The research is also highlighted earlier in this issue of logos: Sweet solution to a salty situation is also environmentally friendly.
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.
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 and Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Their research was highlighted in logos Vol. 20 No. 2: Globus software plugs users into the grid.
The R&D 100 awards, sponsored by R&D magazine, were presented on October 16 during ceremonies at Navy Pier in Chicago, Ill. – Catherine Foster
For more information, please contact Catherine Foster (630/252-5580 or cfoster@anl.gov) at Argonne.
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