including Grid, SOA, Virtualization, Storage, Networking and Service-Oriented IT
GRIDtoday's Inaugural Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards
GRIDtoday, the Leading Source for Global News and Information from the evolving Grid ecosystem, including Grid, SOA, Virtualization, Storage, Networking and Service-Oriented IT, has announced the winners of the publication's inaugural Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards.
The GRIDtoday Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards are determined through a survey of thousands of GRIDtoday readers, and will be a permanent annual feature of the publication.
GRIDtoday has designated two categories of awards: (1) Readers' Choice, where winners have been determined by a random poll of GRIDtoday readers, and (2) Editors' Choice, where winners have been determined by votes of an advisory group of recognized luminaries, contributors and editors influential in Grid and Service-Oriented IT.
EARTH SCIENCES / ENERGY
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Royal Dutch / Shell Group
Shell Oil Company, including its consolidated companies and its share in equity companies, is one of America's leading oil and natural gas producers, natural gas marketers, gasoline marketers and petrochemical manufacturers. Shell, a leading oil and gas producer in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, is a recognized pioneer in oil and gas exploration and production technology. Shell Oil Company is an affiliate of the Shell Group, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, employing approximately 109,000 people and operating in more than 140 countries and territories.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: BP
BP is one of the world's largest energy companies, providing its customers with fuel for transportation, energy for heat and light, retail services and petrochemicals products for everyday items. BP's business is about finding, producing and marketing the natural energy resources on which the modern world depends. BP has transformed, growing from a local oil company into a global energy group; employing over 96,000 people and operating in over 100 countries worldwide.
LIFE SCIENCES (includes Pharma)
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Novartis AG
Novartis AG is a world leader in offering medicines to protect health, treat disease and improve well-being. Our goal is to discover, develop and successfully market innovative products to treat patients, ease suffering and enhance the quality of life. Novartis is the only company with leadership positions in both patented and generic pharmaceuticals. We are strengthening our medicine-based portfolio, which is focused on strategic growth platforms in innovation-driven pharmaceuticals, high-quality and low-cost generics, human vaccines and leading self-medication OTC brands. In 2005, the Group's businesses achieved net sales of USD 32.2 billion and net income of USD 6.1 billion. Approximately USD 4.8 billion was invested in R&D. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis Group companies employ approximately 97,000 people and operate in over 140 countries around the world.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson, through its operating companies, is the world's most comprehensive and broadly based manufacturer of health care products, as well as a provider of related services, for the consumer, pharmaceutical, and medical devices and diagnostics markets. The more than 230 Johnson & Johnson operating companies employ approximately 116,200 men and women in 57 countries and sell products throughout the world. The fundamental objective of Johnson & Johnson is to provide scientifically sound, high quality products and services to help heal, cure disease and improve the quality of life. This is a goal that began with the Company's founding in 1886.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: The Boeing Company
Boeing is one of the world's leading aerospace companies and the largest manufacturer of commercial jetliners and military aircraft combined, with capabilities in rotorcraft, electronic and defense systems, missiles, satellites, launch vehicles and advanced information and communication systems. Their reach extends to customers in 145 countries around the world, and they are the number one U.S. exporter in terms of sales. Boeing has a long tradition of aerospace leadership and innovation. Their broad range of capabilities includes creating new, more efficient members of their commercial airplane family; integrating military platforms, defense systems and the warfighter through network-centric operations; creating advanced technology solutions that reach across business units; e-enabling airplanes and providing connectivity on moving platforms; and arranging financing solutions for their customers.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Airbus
Airbus is one of the world's leading aircraft manufacturers, and reports that they consistently capture approximately half or more of all orders for airliners with more than 100 seats. Airbus' mission is to provide the aircraft best suited to the market's needs and to support these aircraft with the highest quality of service. The Airbus product line comprises 14 aircraft models, from the 100-seat single-aisle A318 jetliner to the 555-seat A380 - which will be the largest civil airliner ever when it enters service in 2006. Since its creation, Airbus has received orders for more than 6,300 aircraft and delivered 4,100-plus airliners to customers worldwide. Airbus also has expanded into the military transport aircraft sector. The A400M multi-role military airlifter - being produced under management of the Airbus Military company - will replace ageing fleets of C-130 Hercules and C-160 Transalls beginning in 2009. In addition, aerial tankers for in-flight refueling and transport missions are available in aircraft variants derived from the A310 and A330.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Pixar Animation Studios
Pixar Animation Studios combines creative and technical artistry to create original stories in the medium of computer animation. Pixar has created six of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Pixar has won 20 Academy Awards® and its six films have grossed more than $3.2 billion at the worldwide box office to date.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: DreamWorks SKG
DreamWorks Animation is principally devoted to developing and producing computer generated, or CG, animated feature films. With world-class creative talent, a strong and experienced management team and advanced CG filmmaking technology and techniques, DreamWorks Animation makes high quality CG animated films meant for a broad movie-going audience. The company has theatrically released a total of twelve animated feature films, including Antz, Shrek, Shrek 2, Shark Tale, Madagascar, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Over the Hedge.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Wachovia Corporation
Wachovia Corporation is one of the nation's largest diversified financial services companies, providing 13.4 million household and business relationships with a broad range of banking, asset management, wealth management and corporate and investment banking products and services. Wachovia has retail and commercial banking operations in 16 states with 3,109 offices from Connecticut to Florida and west to Texas and California. Two core businesses operate under the Wachovia Securities brand name: retail brokerage in 49 states and in Latin America, and corporate and investment banking in selected industries nationwide. Globally, Wachovia serves clients through more than 40 international offices.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $1.3 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries. The firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers, small business and commercial banking, financial transaction processing, asset and wealth management, and private equity. A component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has its corporate headquarters in New York and its U.S. retail financial services and commercial banking headquarters in Chicago. Under the JPMorgan and Chase brands, the firm serves millions of consumers in the United States and many of the world's most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients.
BUSINESS PROCESS EFFICIENCY
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Google
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world's largest search engine -- an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second. Though acknowledged as the world's leading search technology company, Google's goal is to provide a much higher level of service to all those who seek information, whether they're at a desk in Boston, driving through Bonn, or strolling in Bangkok. Google has persistently pursued innovation and pushed the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use search service that can be accessed from anywhere.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: eBay
eBay Inc. pioneers communities built on commerce, sustained by trust, and inspired by opportunity. eBay brings together millions of people every day on a local, national and international basis through an array of websites that focus on commerce, payments and communications. The eBay Marketplace creates a powerful online platform for the sale of goods and services by a passionate community of individuals and small businesses. On any given day, there are millions of items available through auction-style and fixed-price trading. With millions of buyers and sellers worldwide, eBay offers localized sites in the following markets.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: IBM
IBM Grid Computing brings together the appropriate services, software and hardware that can help your organization create a grid or expand an existing implementation. IBM grid solutions are tailored for and organized by the nine key industries that are reaping both business and technology benefits from the power and optimization of grid computing, including aerospace, agricultural chemicals, automotive, electronics, financial services, government, higher education, life sciences, and petroleum. IBM's grid solutions are key business and technology areas where the technology's power and optimization are bringing real benefits, including business analytics, government development, engineering & design, research & development, and enterprise optimization.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Platform Computing
Platform Computing, a global leader in grid computing solutions, helps enterprises accelerate key business applications, reduce operational and capital costs, guarantee service levels and optimize their IT resources. Platform's integrated desktop and enterprise grid software solutions are used by over 1,700 customers worldwide in the financial services, government, industrial manufacturing, electronics and life science industries to deliver higher quality products and services, improve business performance and maximize the return on IT investments. Founded in 1992, Platform has strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, SAS and VMware, and the Industry's broadest application integration support.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Platform Computing
Platform Computing, a global leader in grid computing solutions, helps enterprises accelerate key business applications, reduce operational and capital costs, guarantee service levels and optimize their IT resources. Platform's integrated desktop and enterprise grid software solutions are used by over 1,700 customers worldwide in the financial services, government, industrial manufacturing, electronics and life science industries to deliver higher quality products and services, improve business performance and maximize the return on IT investments. Founded in 1992, Platform has strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, SAS and VMware, and the Industry's broadest application integration support.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Univa Corporation
Univa is a leading provider of commercial software, technical support, and professional services for Grids based on Globus software, the most widely deployed open source Grid infrastructure. Founded in 2004 by the creators of Globus, Univa works with leading enterprises and channel partners, including independent software and IT vendors, and systems integrators, to deliver Grid solutions to Global 2000 corporations. Univa is a privately held company based in Chicago.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: IBM
IBM Grid Computing brings together the appropriate services, software and hardware that can help your organization create a grid or expand an existing implementation. IBM grid solutions are tailored for and organized by the nine key industries that are reaping both business and technology benefits from the power and optimization of grid computing, including aerospace, agricultural chemicals, automotive, electronics, financial services, government, higher education, life sciences, and petroleum. IBM's grid solutions are key business and technology areas where the technology's power and optimization are bringing real benefits, including business analytics, government development, engineering & design, research & development, and enterprise optimization.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: eXludus
eXludus Technologies is a designer software company developing and marketing state-of-the-art data serving technologies for Grid Computing applications. eXludus's products eliminate performance bottlenecks inherent to traditional data transfer mechanisms. The company's products aim to provide unprecedented ROI relative to hardware-only based infrastructure upgrades, while simplifying Grid management, due to their inherent robustness and autonomous failure handling. The technology boosts performance of any networking and file serving infrastructure and interacts directly with popular workload management systems with minimal integration effort.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Voltaire
Voltaire is a worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions for networked computing in the next generation data center. Voltaire's integrated family of switching hardware and network virtualization software delivers the high-performance, intelligent backbone for grid computing architectures. Leveraging the InfiniBand standard, Voltaire solutions offer improved performance, utilization and scalability across compute clusters, storage and IP networks. Voltaire solutions are available from major systems vendors and integrators.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is a worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Today, networks are an essential part of business, education, government and home communications, and Cisco's Internet Protocol-based (IP) networking solutions are the foundation of these networks. Cisco was founded in 1984 by a small group of computer scientists from Stanford University. Since the company's inception, Cisco engineers have been leaders in the development of Internet Protocol (IP)-based networking technologies. Today, with more than 47,000 employees worldwide, this tradition of innovation continues with industry-leading products and solutions in the company's core development areas of routing and switching, as well as in advanced technologies such as IP communications, network security, wireless LAN, storage area networking, home networking, video systems, and application networking services.
a Grid implementation
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Altair Engineering
Altair Engineering, Inc. strengthens client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held with more than 800 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 20-year-plus track record for product design, advanced engineering software and grid computing technologies, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: United Devices
United Devices (UD) provides the most cost-effective and flexible computing capacity available anywhere. The company's grid and infrastructure management solutions address a range of business needs, from traditional application acceleration to enterprise-scale infrastructure virtualization. UD products extend, manage, and optimize IT environments by reducing complexity, leveraging both dedicated and non-dedicated resources and establishing centralized control. UD solutions are proven to enhance innovation and reduce total cost of ownership for companies in a wide range of industries including Manufacturing, Energy, Life Sciences, Government, and Telecommunications.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Sun Microsystems
A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of what they call the next wave of computing: the Participation Age.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: IBM
IBM Grid Computing brings together the appropriate services, software and hardware that can help your organization create a grid or expand an existing implementation. IBM grid solutions are tailored for and organized by the nine key industries that are reaping both business and technology benefits from the power and optimization of grid computing, including aerospace, agricultural chemicals, automotive, electronics, financial services, government, higher education, life sciences, and petroleum. IBM's grid solutions are key business and technology areas where the technology's power and optimization are bringing real benefits, including business analytics, government development, engineering & design, research & development, and enterprise optimization.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Platform Computing
Platform Computing, a global leader in grid computing solutions, helps enterprises accelerate key business applications, reduce operational and capital costs, guarantee service levels and optimize their IT resources. Platform's integrated desktop and enterprise grid software solutions are used by over 1,700 customers worldwide in the financial services, government, industrial manufacturing, electronics and life science industries to deliver higher quality products and services, improve business performance and maximize the return on IT investments. Founded in 1992, Platform has strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, SAS and VMware, and the Industry's broadest application integration support.
Editors' Choice Award Recipients (Tie): United Devices & Digipede Technologies
United Devices (UD) provides the most cost-effective and flexible computing capacity available anywhere. The company's grid and infrastructure management solutions address a range of business needs, from traditional application acceleration to enterprise-scale infrastructure virtualization. UD products extend, manage, and optimize IT environments by reducing complexity, leveraging both dedicated and non-dedicated resources and establishing centralized control. UD solutions are proven to enhance innovation and reduce total cost of ownership for companies in a wide range of industries including Manufacturing, Energy, Life Sciences, Government, and Telecommunications.
Digipede Technologies is the leading software provider of grid computing solutions for the Microsoft .NET platform. Digipede is led by a proven team of technology visionaries who have developed best-in-class Windows applications for more than 15 years. Digipede is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: IBM
IBM Grid Computing brings together the appropriate services, software and hardware that can help your organization create a grid or expand an existing implementation. IBM grid solutions are tailored for and organized by the nine key industries that are reaping both business and technology benefits from the power and optimization of grid computing, including aerospace, agricultural chemicals, automotive, electronics, financial services, government, higher education, life sciences, and petroleum. IBM's grid solutions are key business and technology areas where the technology's power and optimization are bringing real benefits, including business analytics, government development, engineering & design, research & development, and enterprise optimization.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Terrascale Technologies
Terrascale Technologies is a leading developer of next generation storage solutions for high performance enterprise class cluster and grid applications. The TerraGrid Suite, featuring the TerraGrid software architecture and the high performance Storage Brick and Storage Block appliances, delivers industry leading networked storage throughput. Founded in 2002, Terrascale Technologies is headquartered in Montreal, Canada with field offices in McLean, VA and Albuquerque, NM. Additionally, Terrascale has strategic partnerships in the UK and Germany.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is a worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Today, networks are an essential part of business, education, government and home communications, and Cisco's Internet Protocol-based (IP) networking solutions are the foundation of these networks. Cisco was founded in 1984 by a small group of computer scientists from Stanford University. Since the company's inception, Cisco engineers have been leaders in the development of Internet Protocol (IP)-based networking technologies. Today, with more than 47,000 employees worldwide, this tradition of innovation continues with industry-leading products and solutions in the company's core development areas of routing and switching, as well as in advanced technologies such as IP communications, network security, wireless LAN, storage area networking, home networking, video systems, and application networking services.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: Voltaire
Voltaire is a worldwide leader in grid backbone solutions for networked computing in the next generation data center. Voltaire's integrated family of switching hardware and network virtualization software delivers the high-performance, intelligent backbone for grid computing architectures. Leveraging the InfiniBand standard, Voltaire solutions offer improved performance, utilization and scalability across compute clusters, storage and IP networks. Voltaire solutions are available from major systems vendors and integrators.
EARTH SCIENCES / ENERGY applications
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: TeraGrid
TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at nine partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Using high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. These integrated resources include more than 102 teraflops of computing capability and more than 15 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Through the TeraGrid, researchers can access over 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the Resource Provider sites: Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: D-Grid Initiative
The D-GRID initiative brings together universities, research institutes and organizations from the commercial sector to develop an e-Science (enhanced science) network that will carry out research and development in the area of GRID software and advance e-Science pilot projects. The first phase of D-GRID includes the construction of a GRID infrastructure, development of the middleware and a pilot to run GRID applications. During the second phase, the GRID infrastructure will be used to run e-science projects. The development process will closely follow the Global GRID Forum's standards, and will include the use of the Globus Toolkit and UNICORE software. Typical application areas for D-GRID include: climate research; high energy physics; bio medical research; life sciences applications and complex engineering solutions. GRID applications are also expected to lay the foundation for e-business on demand solutions in the commercial environment, providing organizations with a higher degree of adaptability.
LIFE SCIENCES (includes Pharma)
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: RENCI TeraGrid BioPortal
The TeraGrid Bioportal is a shared, extensible portal environment that brings together more than 100 applications and many standard biological data sets. It provides access to high-end computing resources, including a dedicated cluster and TeraGrid systems across the United States. Through the Bioportal, biological researchers, students and educators are able to seamlessly access data, resources and applications, compare biological data stored in different formats and remotely collaborate with colleagues.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient:
Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN)
Drawing upon the expertise and technologies available at numerous institutions, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is building an infrastructure of networked high-performance computers, data integration standards, and other emerging technologies, to pave the way for medical researchers to transform the treatment of disease. Launched in 2001 as an initiative of the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources, the BIRN is prototyping a collaborative environment for biomedical research and clinical information management.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: CERN
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.
Editors' Choice Award Recipients (Tie): TeraGrid & UK e-Science Programme
TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at nine partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Using high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. These integrated resources include more than 102 teraflops of computing capability and more than 15 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Through the TeraGrid, researchers can access over 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the Resource Provider sites: Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Since its inception in 2001, the e-Science programme (made up of application-lead Research Council programmes and a Core Programme to develop and broker generic technology solutions) has made significant impact in establishing an internationally respected portfolio of activities. Illustrating EPSRC and the other Research Councils' commitment to the e-Science initiative, plans are in now in place to oversee the future of the e-Science Core Programme. The e-Science Core Programme is run by EPSRC on behalf of the communities of all the Research Councils. All Research Councils have made commitments to the support of research enabled by e-Science technologies in their respective Delivery Plans, and will continue to meet regularly to share information on their e-Science activities to ensure coordination in this continuing endeavour.
Readers' Choice Award Recipient: CERN
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.
Editors' Choice Award Recipient: TeraGrid
TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure combining leadership class resources at nine partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. Using high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country. These integrated resources include more than 102 teraflops of computing capability and more than 15 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival data storage with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks. Through the TeraGrid, researchers can access over 100 discipline-specific databases. With this combination of resources, the TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. TeraGrid is coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) at the University of Chicago, working in partnership with the Resource Provider sites: Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.