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.

Since its publication, researchers around the world have built on the paper’s techniques. The work has improved how large-scale systems move and manage data and inspired new ideas in distributed computing.

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.

“The field has advanced dramatically in the past two decades, and this groundbreaking research has been a linchpin of our collective success, guiding us toward more efficient and powerful supercomputing solutions,” Foster said.

“This paper demonstrates how a standardized protocol and an implementation with a solid architecture and clean interfaces can enable innovation across a community,” Allcock said. ​“While there are multiple interoperable implementations, most people used our server and its ability to swap out security implementations, network transports and data stores to meet their needs, including solutions we never envisioned.”

“GridFTP showed that high-performance data movement could keep pace with rapidly advancing networks and storage systems,” said Kettimuthu. ​“By demonstrating secure, scalable and modular transfers at unprecedented speeds, it laid the foundation for the data movement services that researchers around the world continue to rely on today through Globus.”

The paper was also authored by John Bresnahan, Catalin Dumitrescu, Mike Link and Ioan Raicu.

The Test of Time Award acknowledges articles that stand apart for their longevity and influence, often serving as cornerstones of HPC. The award will be presented at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, taking place on Nov. 16-21 in St. Louis.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.