National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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. Work began in January 1986.

NCSA is now headquartered within its own building after being scattered around the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, although it was chiefly at The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Its new headquarters is simply referred to as the NCSA Building. The 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 works with universities and colleges, government agencies, private-sector companies, communities, and schools to discover how cyberinfrastructure can benefit them. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies support NCSA. Ed Krol published Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet during his tenure there. In broad terms, NCSA fulfills a responsibility in providing cyber-resources, as well as deploying cyberenvironments and innovative computing systems.

Supercomputing capabilities

NCSA houses multiple supercomputing systems, several with top-20 rankings in their computation speed. As of July 2004, NCSA's Tungsten computing system was the fifth fastest computer in the world, with a peak performance of 15.3 teraflops (15.3 trillion floating point operations per second).

History

See the history of NCSA's inception, growth and overall impact on science and engineering in its 20-year history here.

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. Mosaic provided the foundation for the Netscape Web browser.

Iraq Video Conferencing

NCSA recently helped families of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq reach their loved ones. NCSA provided the high tech video conferencing service free to local families. ^*

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.

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.

Private business partners

Companies that have done business with NCSA include:

External links

Supercomputer sites | Internet history | E-Science | Cyberinfrastructure

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