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Software for managing big data earn the prestigious honor

Technology developed with contributions by professors and graduate students at Rutgers has been selected for R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 Awards. The prestigious honor, which is given for “revolutionary technologies newly introduced to the market,” spans industrial, academic and government-sponsored research.

The winner is ADIOS: Adaptable I/O System for Big Data, developed by a group including Manish Parashar, director of the Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute and professor of electrical and computer engineering, with four of his graduate students.

“We are thrilled to see two technologies tied to Rutgers appear among the R&D 100 for 2013, particularly given the impressive nature of the scientific breakthroughs chosen this year and the history of previous winners succeeding in the marketplace,” Breslauer said. “Rik Riman and Manish Parashar are two outstanding Rutgers researchers. We are extremely pleased with this prestigious recognition.”

ADIOS is a collection of software services that is now being adopted by both commercial and academic users to manage big data for extreme scale supercomputing for research in areas such as combustion, fusion and sub-surface modeling in oil and gas exploration. Rutgers’ primary contribution is “DataSpaces,” a software framework that provides essential services for managing and processing data produced by large-scale simulations, while addressing issues related to scale, performance, and energy costs. It essentially enables scientists to examine and query data while their large-scale simulations are producing it. ADIOS and DataSpaces are being used by a large number of applications.

“While, it’s fun to do the research, it’s good to see the work having an impact, and that’s why this recognition is extremely satisfying,” Parashar said. “It provides evidence that the research we’re doing at Rutgers is enabling new science and new insights in important areas.”

Parashar has collaborated with the project lead, Scott Klasky of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, since they were post-doctoral fellows in 1994 at the University of Texas, Austin. Georgia Institute of Technology and North Carolina State University also contributed to the development of ADIOS. The Rutgers doctoral students who worked with Parashar on ADIOS are Hoang Bui, Tong Jin, Qian Sun, and Fan Zhang.