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A Sandia National Laboratories research team has won R&D 100 Awards in the annual competition sponsored by the Chicago-based R&D Magazine. The award is for the creation of the software framework and library Trilinos, which provides broad-ranging, robust, and high-performance capabilities for solving numerical systems at the heart of many complex multiphysics engineering and scientific applications. &D Magazine annually gives the awards to the top 100 industrial innovations worldwide. This year Department of Energy (DOE) labs — of which Sandia is one — have won a total of 34 R&D 100 awards, says Jeannette Mallozzi, the magazine's managing editor. Winners will be presented plaques at a formal banquet in October at Chicago's Navy Pier. "The research groups winning these awards at Sandia this year are truly innovative and on the cutting edge of science," says Sandia President C. Paul Robinson. "Trilinos has had a major impact on Sandia's engineering modeling and simulation capabilities over the past several years, and with its public licensing we are extending that to broad national impact." Trilinos is part of a broad effort on the part of national laboratories, industry, and academia to establish high-fidelity computational modeling and simulation as an approach to engineering and scientific understanding so that it becomes an equal partner with the most basic approaches of theory and experiment. Trilinos provides a common enabling solution to one of the most difficult problems in creating these simulations: How can one solve the massive and complex systems of equations required, and do so in a way that "scales" all the way from laptop computers to the most powerful and complex parallel computers in the world? Trilinos has become tremendously successful at addressing this "solver problem" and has become, for example, a critical enabler for the diverse simulation codes that support almost every major engineering discipline within The Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. Trilinos, led by Mike Heroux, is under development at both Sandia/New Mexico and Sandia/California, with some 24 researchers involved in the project. Trilinos offers what is probably the largest and most complete scalable solver capability in the world, and it is freely available to the public. Meaning "string of pearls" in Greek, Trilinos has an architecture in which object-oriented packages, each of which provides a particular solver capability, are strung together like pearls on a necklace and represent more than the sum of the parts. Trilinos began as 3 packages, has rapidly expanded to 20, and continues to grow. Computational researchers and software developers find Trilinos attractive because they need only focus on those aspects of development that are unique to their package. Each Trilinos package is a self-contained, independent piece of software with its own set of requirements, its own development team, and its own group of users. Because of this, Trilinos is designed to respect the autonomy of packages. Trilinos offers a variety of ways for a particular package to interact with other Trilinos packages. It also offers developers a set of tools for building on multiple platforms, generating documentation, and multi-platform regression testing.