About the FL
Access Grid Wins R&D 100 Award
Researchers in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory have won an R&D 100 award for Access Grid 3.0: Group Collaboration Software. The award is given annually by R&D magazine to the year's most technologically significant new products.
The Argonne Futures Lab performs basic and applied research in advanced communications, collaboration, and visualization technologies (e.g., teleimmersion) to enable the development of wide-area collaborative computational science. Our focus is on the development and evaluation of high-end technologies and systems that ext end and complement commercially available tools and resources.
Enabling Group-to-Group Communication
The Access Grid is a long-standing project that provides infrastructure for group-to-group communication. Version 3 of the Access Grid software delivers improved interoperability, robustness, usability, and performance.
Providing a National Bioinformatics Environment
The National Microbial Pathogen Data Resource Center, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, provides an advanced bioinformatics environment to support research in biodefense, emerging infectious diseases, and re-emerging pathogens. NMPDR is both a central repository for scientific data on these pathogenic microorganisms and a platform for software tools that support investigator-driven data analysis.
Supporting Research in the Social Sciences
The Social Informatics Data Grid (SIDGrid) provides an infrastructure for supporting collaborative research in the social and behavioral sciences. Currently, SIDGrid focuses on three complementary areas: (1) multimodal communication in humans and machines, (2) neurobiology of social behavior in human and animals, and (3) cognitive and social neuroscience.
Providing Visualization Resources
The University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory TeraGrid Resource Provider known as Visualization and Data Resource is focused on acting as one of two dedicated visualization resources for the TeraGrid community, producing visualization services for users and deploying tools and libraries for researchers in visualization and graphics
and providing a testbed to support the testing and packaging of current and prototype TeraGrid software stacks.
Visualizing Astrophysics
The Futures Laboratory is involved in the data analysis and visualization of results of the University of Chicago Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes, funded by Department of Energy ASC/Alliances Program. The Center is home to FLASH, the state-of-the-art simulator code for solving nuclear astrophysical problems related to exploding stars.