National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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Established	1986
Focus	Cyberinfrastructure, supercomputing, cyber-resources, cyberenvironments, visualization
Director	[Thom Dunning]
Location	Urbana, Illinois, USA
Affiliation	University of Illinois
Website	www.ncsa.uiuc.edu

Image:New bldg3.jpg

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program and a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The center was founded when a group of UIUC faculty, led by Larry Smarr, sent an unsolicited proposal to the NSF in 1983; the NSF announced funding for the supercomputer centers in 1985. The first supercomputer at the Center came online in January 1986.

Initially, NCSA's administrative offices were housed in the Water Resources Building. NCSA is now headquartered within its own building after being scattered around the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The new NCSA Building is directly north of the Siebel Center for Computer Science. The Center's array of supercomputers remains housed at the Advanced Computation Building.

NCSA is a unique state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. NCSA works with universities and colleges, government agencies, companies and schools to discover the benefits of cyberinfrastructure.

1 Supercomputing capabilities
2 History
3 Private business partners
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Supercomputing capabilities

NCSA provides leading-edge computing, data storage, and visualization resources. NCSA computational and data environment implements a multi-architecture hardware strategy to be able to support high-end users and communities on the architectures best suited to their requirements. The major computing systems in production at NCSA include four clusters, three of which are for use of the National Science Foundation community, and two shared memory machines, both of which are for use by the NSF community. In 2006, NCSA provided more than 717 million normalized units (NUs) to the NSF research and education community. Nearly 1,360 scientists, engineers and students used the computing and data systems at NCSA to support research in more than 830 projects. A list of NCSA hardware is available at NCSA Capabilities

[edit] History

Image:Mosaic browser plaque ncsa.jpg

NCSA opened its doors to the national scientific computing community in January 1986. Since then, the bottom line has always been helping researchers get their work done and propelling science toward its next discovery. See the history of NCSA's inception, growth and overall impact on science and engineering in its 20-year history here.

[edit] Mosaic

The Mosaic web browser, the first graphical Web browser which played an important part in expanding the growth of the World Wide Web and the Internet, was written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA. Andreessen and Bina went on to develop the Netscape Web browser. Mosaic was later licensed to Spyglass who provided the foundation for Internet Explorer.

[edit] Movies/Visualization

NCSA's visualization department is maybe the most well-known sector around the country and world. They have made movies using the supercomputers - one of which was shown on PBS' show NOVA.

[edit] Thom Dunning, Director

Thom Dunning, the Director of NCSA, has a long list of achievements and leadership positions within different technological groups across the country. Dunning studied as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri–Rolla, a well-known engineering school, and went on to earn a PhD at the California Institute of Technology. He later went on to work at the University of Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the United States Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory.

[edit] Private business partners

Companies that have done business with NCSA include<ref>Larry Smarr's testimony before US House of Representatives</ref> :

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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