Among R&D's best of 2002

by Stephanie Drake

Globus Toolkit and HDF5 are among R&D Magazine's choices for the 100 most significant technologies in 2002. Both of these software projects significant involvement by Alliance partners. The 2002 R&D 100 awards go to developers of products released in 2001.

The R&D 100 Awards will be the subject of an article in R&D Magazine's September issue. Each winning technology will also be showcased during a multimedia presentation at an awards banquet and exhibition in Chicago on October 16.

The Globus Toolkit, begun in 1996, is an open architecture, open source software toolkit that is central to distributed computing. Core software development for this toolkit is conducted by the Globus Project at Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and the University of Chicago. Many other projects and developers around the world have contributed to the Globus Toolkit. Major contributors include the ACES group at NCSA, the Condor Project team at the University of Wisconsin, the ASCI Distributed Resource Management (DRM) team at Sandia National Laboratory, the Information Power Grid team within the NAS division at NASA Ames Research Center, IBM Corporation, and Compaq Computer Corporation.

HDF5 is the newest generation of HDF, a data file format developed at NCSA in 1987 for managing scientific data. In 1997 NCSA teamed with the three Department of Energy laboratories to completely rewrite and upgrade HDF. The resulting product is HDF5, which helps users store, manipulate, and share scientific data; handles files of unlimited size; works across diverse operating systems; takes advantage of parallel computing to speed up the process of creating files and working with scientific data; and features a library of callable routines, utility programs, and tools for creating HDF5 files, converting files into HDF5, and analyzing and visualizing data. All HDF5 collaborators—NCSA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)—share in the R&D award.

The R&D 100 Awards were established in 1963 by the forerunner of today's R&D Magazine. Technical experts and the magazine's editors evaluate entries looking for products and processes that are the most "technologically significant" of the year and that can change people's lives for the better. An R&D 100 Award is considered by some as the most prestigious honor in applied research.

Among past R&D 100 Awards are such breakthroughs as Polacolor film, the digital wristwatch, antilock brakes, the automated teller machine, the liquid crystal display, the halogen lamp, the fax machine, the touch-sensitive screen, the antismoking nicotine patch, Taxol anticancer drug, and high-definition television.

Additional information is available through the following websites:

• R&D 100
• R&D September issue
• Globus Toolkit
• HDF5