Globus GridFTP Innovation Wins SC25 Test of Time Award
Pioneering research paper recognized for its lasting impact on high-performance computing
Chicago—October 13, 2025—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 and Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago; 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.
DOE researchers collaborated with Michael Link and John Bresnahan, both current members of the Globus team at the University of Chicago. Additional authors included Catalin Dumitrescu and Ioan Raicu.
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 to remote systems, opening the door to major advances in HPC.
At the time, securely transferring large datasets over wide-area networks was a significant bottleneck for researchers. The Globus Striped GridFTP framework addressed this problem by improving the standard file transfer protocol (FTP) to include stronger security, integrity checking and encryption, and by allowing large 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 including the Globus service—a widely used cyberinfrastructure platform— launched through a partnership between the University of Chicago and Argonne and currently operated by the University of Chicago on behalf of the global research community.
In addition to providing a reliable file transfer service built on the GridFTP technology introduced in this paper, the Globus platform enables secure data sharing, remote computation, and task automation spanning the research lifecycle. Researchers in all disciplines—from physics and genomics to social sciences—use the platform to move, share, and manage petabytes of data at thousands of institutions worldwide.
The University of Chicago and Argonne researchers said they are honored with this recognition. “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 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 on Nov. 18 at SC25, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, taking place in St. Louis.
About Globus
Globus is a data management and compute platform used by leading non-profit and commercial research organizations, national laboratories, and government facilities worldwide. Operated by the University of Chicago, the Globus data management service enables secure, reliable file transfer, sharing, remote computation and automation throughout the research lifecycle. The Globus platform supports access to all types of storage systems and diverse computing resources, from lab servers and campus clusters to cloud and supercomputing environments. Globus connects more than 50,000 organizations in over 80 countries.