Argonne’s GridFTP Innovation Wins SC25 Test of Time Award

LEMONT, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The team behind the 2005 paper ​“The Globus Striped GridFTP Framework and Server” will receive this year’s Test of Time Award at the SC25 supercomputing conference.

The paper is being honored for its foundational role in high performance computing (HPC) and its lasting influence on research and practice in the field. The team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory includes Ian Foster, director of the Data Science and Learning division and an Argonne Distinguished Fellow; Bill Allcock, team lead at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF); and Rajkumar Kettimuthu, senior scientist and group leader in the Data Science and Learning division. The ALCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility.

In 2005, the authors introduced a new way to move massive amounts of scientific data quickly and securely over the internet. Their work offered creative solutions to long-standing problems in distributing files over long distances, opening the door to major advances in HPC.

At the time, securely transferring terabytes of scientific data over wide-area networks was a significant bottleneck for researchers. The team’s Globus Striped GridFTP framework solved this by improving the standard file transfer protocol (FTP) to include stronger security, integrity checking and encryption, and by allowing huge files to be broken into smaller pieces that could be sent in parallel over multiple network connections and storage systems. This method dramatically increased transfer speeds and improved security, letting scientists fully utilize the bandwidth of high-speed research networks for the first time.

Globus was launched through a partnership between Argonne and the University of Chicago. Today, it is a widely used cyberinfrastructure platform, and its transfer service directly builds on the GridFTP technology introduced in this paper. Researchers at thousands of institutions worldwide use Globus to securely and reliably move, share and manage petabytes of data across disciplines ranging from physics to genomics.

The Argonne researchers said they are honored to be recognized.