Lasting Innovation in Data Movement: SC25 Test of Time Award

The SC25 Test of Time (ToT) committee is pleased to announce that The Globus Striped GridFTP Framework and Server by William Allcock, John Bresnahan, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Michael Link, Catalin Dumitrescu, Ioan Raicu, and Ian Foster has been selected as the winner of this year’s award.

First published at SC05, this important paper addressed one of the central challenges in supercomputing at the time: how to move very large amounts of data both reliably and securely, without sacrificing performance. The authors’ solution, the striped GridFTP framework, made it possible for multiple servers and clients to work together in parallel, significantly increasing the scale and speed of transfers. At the time, these capabilities allowed data to move at rates far beyond what existing tools could support, while also serving thousands of users simultaneously.

The influence of this work has been profound. For nearly two decades, GridFTP provided the foundation for scientific discovery in many fields: enabling the movement of telescope sky survey data, supporting analysis from large particle accelerators, and helping transfer vast genomic datasets. It became a trusted and widely adopted tool for the global research community—well before today’s cloud-based approaches were available.

Reflecting on the award, SC25 Test of Time Award Chair Bill Gropp shared:

“The Globus Striped GridFTP paper represents a milestone in data movement for computational science. Its approach has been widely adopted and remains a critical part of the community’s infrastructure. Few technologies have had such a lasting impact, and this paper represents perfectly what our Test of Time Award is all about.”

ToTA at SC25