News

The TeraGrid, a powerful computing facility that integrates distributed resources from nine research institutions including the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, was honored in the inaugural Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards at the recent GridWorld Conference in Washington, D.C.

The awards recognize the importance of achievements in giving scientists an integrated set of resources and services, or cyberinfrastructure, they can use to ask global and complex scientific questions within the large-scale collaborative efforts that are the leading edge of today's science.

TeraGrid received the following awards:

• Editors' Choice: Research Grid Initiative that you feel has earned the reputation of overall Top Research Grid
• Editors' Choice: Research organization demonstrating the Most Innovative Grid Implementation in Government Research
• Readers' Choice: Research organization demonstrating the most innovative research in support of Earth Sciences-Energy applications

"TeraGrid is pleased to be recognized by GRIDtoday for our use of Grid technology to support scientific research," said Charlie Catlett, director of the TeraGrid. "With support of the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, TeraGrid gives scientists an integrated set of resources and services with which to ask global and complex scientific questions within large-scale collaborative efforts."

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) received an Editors' Choice Award for "demonstrating the most innovative Grid implementation in Life Sciences." The BIRN Network, supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Center for Research Resources, is a geographically distributed virtual community of shared resources offering tremendous potential to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

"The focus of the BIRN Network is in disciplines related to medical science." said Professor Mark Ellisman of UCSD, director of the BIRN Coordinating Center. "So it's especially gratifying to receive this recognition for our close interdisciplinary collaboration with the IT community in building the advanced cyberinfrastructure that is essential for medical researchers to be able to transform the treatment of disease."

The GRIDtoday Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards are determined by a survey of thousands of GRIDtoday readers, and will be a permanent annual feature of the publication. GRIDtoday has designated two categories of awards: Readers' Choice Awards, where winners are determined by a random poll of GRIDtoday readers, and Editors' Choice Awards, where winners are determined by votes of an advisory group of recognized luminaries, contributors, and editors influential in Grid and Service-Oriented IT.

"We are very excited about this opportunity to articulate the views and opinions of our readers to recognize the accomplishments that are being made in advancing the development and adoption of Grid, Service-Oriented IT and virtualization", said Tom Tabor, publisher of GRIDtoday. "These industry recognition awards send a strong message to the recipients that the many global contributors working in or watching this important computing segment recognize their work, and consider their efforts meritorious. Our congratulations go out to all the winners."

Computational grids are being used in fields such as academic research, automotive and aerospace, bio-IT, humanities research, security and defense, financial services, government, manufacturing, oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications and others.