National Center For Supercomputing Applications

Information about National Center For Supercomputing Applications

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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

NCSA Building, 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana, IL 61801.

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 University of Illinois faculty, led by Larry Smarr, sent an unsolicited proposal to the National Science Foundation in 1983. The foundation 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.

Supercomputing capabilities

NCSA provides leading-edge computing, data storage, and visualization resources. NCSA computational and data environment implements a multi-architecture hardware strategy 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

History

A plaque commemorating the creation of Mosaic web browser, in front of the new NCSA building

Since NCSA opened its doors in January 1986, the bottom line has always been helping researchers get their work done and propelling science toward its next discovery. Some milestones in NCSA's history include the release of image and Datascope in 1988; Black Hole simulations supporting the development of LIGO in 1992; the release of Mosaic in 1993; tracking of the Hale-Bopp Comet in 1997; and the creation of a Playstation 2 Cluster in 2003. See the complete 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 popular 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.

Movies/Visualization

NCSA's visualization department is maybe the most well-known sector around the country and world. Donna Cox, leader of the Visualization Division at NCSA and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her team have thrilled millions of people with visualizations for the Oscar-nominated IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage," the PBS NOVA episodes "Hunt for the Supertwister" and "Runaway Universe," as well as Discovery Channel documentaries and pieces for CNN and NBC Nightly News. Cox and NCSA worked with the American Museum of Natural History to produce high-resolution visualizations for the Hayden Planetarium's 2000 Millennium show, "Passport to the Universe," and for "The Search for Life: Are We Alone?" She produced visualizations for the Hayden's "Big Bang Theatre" and is currently working with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to produce high-resolution data-driven visualizations of terabytes of scientific data for a digital dome program on black holes.

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, 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:^[1]

External links

• • [ e]
Academics	Undergraduate Colleges and Schools ACES • Business • Communications • Education • Engineering • Fine and Applied Arts • Liberal Arts & Sciences • Institute of Aviation Graduate Colleges and Schools Applied Health Sciences • Graduate College • Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations • Law • Library and Information Science • Medicine • Social Work • Veterinary Medicine
Athletics	Fighting Illini • Assembly Hall • Basketball • Chief Illiniwek • CRCE • Football • Huff Hall • IMPE • Kenney Gym • Memorial Stadium
Points of Interest	Allerton Park • Arboretum • The Beckman Institute • Boneyard Creek • Conservatory • CSL • Engineering Campus • Grainger • Illini Union • Krannert Center • Libraries • Lincoln Hall • Main Campus • Morrow Plots • NCSA • Spurlock Museum
Students	Alumni • Illini Media • Marching Illini • Orange Krush • Residence Halls • Oskee Wow-Wow • Illinois Loyalty • Star Course

References

1. ^ Larry Smarr's testimony before US House of Representatives

19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s 1960s 1970s - 1980s - 1990s 2000s 2010s
1983 1984 1985 - 1986 - 1987 1988 1989

Year 1986 (MCMLXXXVI
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The term "cyberinfrastructure" was used by a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) blue-ribbon committee in 2003 in response to the question: how can NSF, as the nation's premier agency funding basic research, remove existing barriers to the rapid evolution of high
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For other uses, see Supercomputer (disambiguation).

A supercomputer is a computer that led the world (or was close to doing so) in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction.
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Cyberenvironments are technologies that provide an easy-to-use interface to local and shared instruments, sensor arrays, data stores and data sets, computational systems, networks, scientific and engineering applications, data analysis and visualization tools and services, and
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Scientific- (or data-), and Information visualization are branches of computer graphics and user interface design that are concerned with presenting data to users, by means of images. The goal of this area is usually to improve understanding of the data being presented.
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City of Urbana, Illinois
City |

A snowy day in Carle Park west of the Urbana High School. On the right is a statue of Abraham Lincoln by Lorado Taft.

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Motto
"In God We Trust" (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum" ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, or simply Illinois), is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious campus in the University of Illinois system.
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National Science Foundation

NSF logo
Motto: Where Discoveries Begin

Agency overview
Formed 10 May 1950

Headquarters Arlington, VA
Employees 1700
Annual Budget $5.
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Larry Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure.

He received both his BA and MS at the University of Missouri–Columbia and received a Ph.D.
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The Engineering Campus is the colloquial name for the Bardeen Quadrangle and the Beckman Quadrangle at the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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This article relates to the browser produced by NCSA. For the browser that was renamed Netscape Navigator, see that article.

Mosaic

Mosaic 3.
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A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network.
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World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, a user views web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks.
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Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government
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Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in Cedar Falls, Iowa and raised in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, United States) is a software engineer and entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.
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Eric J. Bina (born October 1964) is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of
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For the web browser produced by this corporation, see .

Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape
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Spyglass may refer to:

Another term for a telescope
A recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live
Spyglass Entertainment
Spyglass Board Games, a collection of board games on Xbox Live Arcade
Spyglass, Inc., software company
J.

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Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of proprietary graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems
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Nova is a popular science television series from the USA produced by WGBH Boston. It can be seen on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries.
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worldwide view of the subject.
Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page.

"Ph.D." redirects here, for other uses see Ph.D. (disambiguation).

Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph.D.
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California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech)^[1] is a private, coeducational research university located in Pasadena, California, in the United States. Caltech maintains a strong emphasis on the natural sciences and engineering.
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The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system in the American state of Tennessee.
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville.
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public, coeducational, research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Also known as The University of North Carolina, Carolina, North Carolina, or simply UNC
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United States
Department of Energy

Seal of the Department of Energy
Agency overview
Formed August 4, 1977

Employees 16,100 federal
100,000 contract (2004)
Annual Budget $23.
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Argonne National Laboratory is one of the United States Department of Energy's oldest and largest science and engineering research national laboratories and is the largest in the Midwest, about twice as large as the nearby Fermilab.
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