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National Center for Supercomputing Applications

October 27, 2023

For the center of the same name in Bulgaria, see National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Bulgaria).

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States.[1][2] NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,[3] and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation,[1][4][5][6] the state of Illinois,[2] the University of Illinois, business and industry partners,[7] and other federal agencies.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications
NCSA Building, 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana, Illinois 61801.
Established1986
Field of research
DirectorBill Gropp
LocationUrbana, Illinois, US
AffiliationsUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Websitewww.ncsa.illinois.edu

NCSA provides leading-edge computing, data storage, and visualization resources. NCSA computational and data environment implements a multi-architecture hardware strategy, deploying both clusters and shared memory systems to support high-end users and communities on the architectures best-suited to their requirements. Nearly 1,360 scientists, engineers and students used the computing and data systems at NCSA to support research in more than 830 projects.

NCSA is led by Bill Gropp.[8]

History edit

NCSA is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program.[1] The idea for NCSA and the four other supercomputer centers arose from the frustration of its founder, Larry Smarr, who wrote an influential paper, "The Supercomputer Famine in American Universities", in 1982, after having to travel to Europe in summertime to access supercomputers and conduct his research.[9]

Smarr wrote a proposal to address the future needs of scientific research. Seven other University of Illinois professors joined as co-principal investigators, and many others provided descriptions of what could be accomplished if the proposal were accepted. Known as the Black Proposal (after the color of its cover), it was submitted to the NSF in 1983. It met the NSF's mandate and its contents immediately generated excitement. However, the NSF had no organization in place to support it, and the proposal itself did not contain a clearly defined home for its implementation.

The NSF established an Office of Scientific Computing in 1984 and, with strong congressional support, it announced a national competition that would fund a set of supercomputer centers like the one described in the Black Proposal.[10] The result was that four supercomputer centers would be chartered (Cornell, Illinois, Princeton, and San Diego), with a fifth (Pittsburgh) added later.

The Black Proposal was approved in 1985 and marked the foundation of NCSA, with $42,751,000 in funding from 1 January 1985 through 31 December 1989. This was also noteworthy in that the NSF's action of approving an unsolicited proposal was unprecedented. NCSA opened its doors in January 1986.[11][12]

In 2007, NCSA was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to build "Blue Waters",[13] a supercomputer capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second, a level of performance known as petascale.

Black Proposal edit

The 'Black Proposal'[14] was a short, ten-page proposal for the creation of a supercomputing center that eventually led to funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create supercomputing centers, including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. In this sense, the significant role played by the U.S. Government in funding the center, and the first widely popular web browser (NCSA's Mosaic), cannot be denied.

The Black Proposal described the limitations on any scientific research that required computer capabilities, and it described a future world of productive scientific collaboration, centered on universal computer access, in which technical limitations on scientific research would not exist. Significantly, it expressed a clear vision of how to get from the present to the future. The proposal was titled "A Center for Scientific and Engineering Supercomputing", and was ten pages long.

The proposal's vision of the computing future were then unusual or non-existent, but elements of it are now commonplace, such as visualization, workstations, high-speed I/O, data storage, software engineering, and close collaboration with the multi-disciplinary user community.

Modern readers of the Black Proposal may gain insight into a world that no longer exists. Today's computers are easy to use, and the web is omnipresent. Employees in high-tech endeavors are given supercomputer accounts simply because they are employees. Computers are universally available and can be used by almost anyone of any age, applicable to almost anything.

At the time the proposal was written, computers were available to almost no one. For scientists who needed computers in their research, access was difficult if available at all. The effect on research was crippling. Reading publications from that time gives no hint that scientists were required to learn the arcane technical details of whatever computer facilities were available to them, a time-consuming limitation on their research, and an exceedingly tedious distraction from their professional interests.

The implementation of the Black Proposal had a primary role in shaping the computer technology of today, and its impact on research (both scientific and otherwise) has been profound. The proposal's description of the leading edge of scientific research may be sobering, and the limitations on computer usage at major universities may be surprising. A comprehensive list of the world's supercomputers shows the best resources that were then available. The thrust of the proposal may seem obvious now, but was then novel.

The National Science Foundation announced funding for the supercomputer centers in 1985;[15] The first supercomputer at NCSA came online in January 1986.

NCSA quickly came to the attention of the worldwide scientific community with the release of NCSA Telnet in 1986. A number of other tools followed, and like NCSA Telnet, all were made available to everyone at no cost. In 1993, NCSA released the Mosaic web browser, the first popular graphical Web browser, which played an important part in expanding the growth of the World Wide Web. NCSA Mosaic was written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, who went on to develop the Netscape Web browser. Mosaic was later licensed to Spyglass, Inc. which provided the foundation for Internet Explorer. The server-complement was called NCSA HTTPd, which later became known as Apache HTTP Server.[16]

Other notable contributions by NCSA were the black hole simulations supporting the development of LIGO in 1992, the tracking of Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997, the creation of a PlayStation 2 Cluster in 2003, and the monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic and creation of a COVID-19 vaccine.[17][18]

Facilities edit

Initially, NCSA's administrative offices were in the Water Resources Building and employees were scattered across the campus. NCSA is now headquartered within its own building directly north of the Siebel Center for Computer Science, on the site of a former baseball field, Illini Field. NCSA's supercomputers are at the National Petascale Computing Facility.[2][19]

Movies and visualization edit

NCSA's visualization department is internationally well-known. Donna Cox, leader of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at NCSA and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and her team created 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 worked with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to produce high-resolution data-driven visualizations of terabytes of scientific data for "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity", a digital dome program on black holes.

Private business partners edit

Referred to as the Industrial Partners program when it began in 1986, NCSA's collaboration with major corporations ensured that its expertise and emerging technologies would be relevant to major challenges outside of the academic world, as those challenges arose. Business partners had no control over research or the disposition of its results, but they were well-situated to be early adopters of any benefits of the research. This program is now called NCSA Industry.[20]

Past and current business partners include:

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c . www.nsf.gov/. Archived from the original on 2017-08-01. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  2. ^ a b c "Illinois State Government Press Release: State Invested $60 Million to House the "Blue Waters" Supercomputer". Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  3. ^ "Encyclopædia Britannica: University of Illinois includes the NCSA unit". Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  4. ^ "NSF Press Release 11-152: XSEDE Project Brings Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, Digital Services and Expertise to Nation's Scientists and Engineers". Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  5. ^ "NSF Press Release 13-056: NSF-Supported Blue Waters, One of the World's Most Powerful Computers, Is Open for Research". www.nsf.gov/. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  6. ^ "NSF Award Abstract #1261582: CIF21 DIBBs: Brown Dog". www.nsf.gov/. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  7. ^ a b c "SUPERCOMPUTER LAB'S QUANTUM LEAP". Crain's Chicago Business. 1997-06-09. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  8. ^ "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign". www.ncsa.illinois.edu. 26 June 2017. Retrieved 2017-11-06.
  9. ^ Smarr, Larry (1982). "The Supercomputer Famine in American Universities (in The Report of the Panel on Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering)".
  10. ^ "Panel 2: Supercomputer Center Officials", Federal Supercomputer Programs and Policies, United States Printing Office (published 1986), 1985, pp. 85–280. Congressional hearings of 10 June 1985 with testimony from Supercomputer Center officials.
  11. ^ "Illinois Scientists Open Supercomputer Center". articles.latimes.com. January 19, 1986. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  12. ^ . Archived from the original on 2016-08-13. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  13. ^ "National Science Board Approves Funds for Petascale Computing Systems". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2007-08-24.
  14. ^ Smarr, Larry; et al. (1983), (PDF)
  15. ^ NSF Award #8404556, Phase II: Supercomputer Center, 1986
  16. ^ "Encyclopædia Britannica: Apache Web Server, originally known as NCSA HTTPd web server". Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  17. ^ "NCSA's history of itself". Ncsa.uiuc.edu. 2008-08-14. Retrieved 2012-10-14.
  18. ^ Broad, William (2020-03-26). "A.I. Versus the Coronavirus". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-03-28.
  19. ^ . Archived from the original on 2014-08-08. Retrieved 2014-08-06.
  20. ^ "Offering Industry and Government Solutions to Grand Challenges". Retrieved 2017-11-17.

External links edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
  • Official website
  • NCSA on GitHub

40°6′53.4″N 88°13′30.0″W / 40.114833°N 88.225000°W / 40.114833; -88.225000

October 27, 2023
national, center, supercomputing, applications, this, article, tone, style, reflect, encyclopedic, tone, used, wikipedia, wikipedia, guide, writing, better, articles, suggestions, june, 2022, learn, when, remove, this, template, message, center, same, name, bu. This article s tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia See Wikipedia s guide to writing better articles for suggestions June 2022 Learn how and when to remove this template message For the center of the same name in Bulgaria see National Center for Supercomputing Applications Bulgaria The National Center for Supercomputing Applications NCSA is a state federal partnership to develop and deploy national scale computer infrastructure that advances research science and engineering based in the United States 1 2 NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign 3 and provides high performance computing resources to researchers across the country Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation 1 4 5 6 the state of Illinois 2 the University of Illinois business and industry partners 7 and other federal agencies National Center for Supercomputing ApplicationsNCSA Building 1205 W Clark St Urbana Illinois 61801 Established1986Field of researchHigh performance computing Cyberinfrastructure Cyber security Scientific visualizationDirectorBill GroppLocationUrbana Illinois USAffiliationsUniversity of Illinois Urbana ChampaignWebsitewww wbr ncsa wbr illinois wbr eduNCSA provides leading edge computing data storage and visualization resources NCSA computational and data environment implements a multi architecture hardware strategy deploying both clusters and shared memory systems to support high end users and communities on the architectures best suited to their requirements Nearly 1 360 scientists engineers and students used the computing and data systems at NCSA to support research in more than 830 projects NCSA is led by Bill Gropp 8 Contents 1 History 1 1 Black Proposal 2 Facilities 3 Movies and visualization 4 Private business partners 5 See also 6 References 7 External linksHistory editNCSA is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation s Supercomputer Centers Program 1 The idea for NCSA and the four other supercomputer centers arose from the frustration of its founder Larry Smarr who wrote an influential paper The Supercomputer Famine in American Universities in 1982 after having to travel to Europe in summertime to access supercomputers and conduct his research 9 Smarr wrote a proposal to address the future needs of scientific research Seven other University of Illinois professors joined as co principal investigators and many others provided descriptions of what could be accomplished if the proposal were accepted Known as the Black Proposal after the color of its cover it was submitted to the NSF in 1983 It met the NSF s mandate and its contents immediately generated excitement However the NSF had no organization in place to support it and the proposal itself did not contain a clearly defined home for its implementation The NSF established an Office of Scientific Computing in 1984 and with strong congressional support it announced a national competition that would fund a set of supercomputer centers like the one described in the Black Proposal 10 The result was that four supercomputer centers would be chartered Cornell Illinois Princeton and San Diego with a fifth Pittsburgh added later The Black Proposal was approved in 1985 and marked the foundation of NCSA with 42 751 000 in funding from 1 January 1985 through 31 December 1989 This was also noteworthy in that the NSF s action of approving an unsolicited proposal was unprecedented NCSA opened its doors in January 1986 11 12 In 2007 NCSA was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to build Blue Waters 13 a supercomputer capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second a level of performance known as petascale Black Proposal edit The Black Proposal 14 was a short ten page proposal for the creation of a supercomputing center that eventually led to funding from the National Science Foundation NSF to create supercomputing centers including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications NCSA at the University of Illinois In this sense the significant role played by the U S Government in funding the center and the first widely popular web browser NCSA s Mosaic cannot be denied The Black Proposal described the limitations on any scientific research that required computer capabilities and it described a future world of productive scientific collaboration centered on universal computer access in which technical limitations on scientific research would not exist Significantly it expressed a clear vision of how to get from the present to the future The proposal was titled A Center for Scientific and Engineering Supercomputing and was ten pages long The proposal s vision of the computing future were then unusual or non existent but elements of it are now commonplace such as visualization workstations high speed I O data storage software engineering and close collaboration with the multi disciplinary user community Modern readers of the Black Proposal may gain insight into a world that no longer exists Today s computers are easy to use and the web is omnipresent Employees in high tech endeavors are given supercomputer accounts simply because they are employees Computers are universally available and can be used by almost anyone of any age applicable to almost anything At the time the proposal was written computers were available to almost no one For scientists who needed computers in their research access was difficult if available at all The effect on research was crippling Reading publications from that time gives no hint that scientists were required to learn the arcane technical details of whatever computer facilities were available to them a time consuming limitation on their research and an exceedingly tedious distraction from their professional interests The implementation of the Black Proposal had a primary role in shaping the computer technology of today and its impact on research both scientific and otherwise has been profound The proposal s description of the leading edge of scientific research may be sobering and the limitations on computer usage at major universities may be surprising A comprehensive list of the world s supercomputers shows the best resources that were then available The thrust of the proposal may seem obvious now but was then novel The National Science Foundation announced funding for the supercomputer centers in 1985 15 The first supercomputer at NCSA came online in January 1986 NCSA quickly came to the attention of the worldwide scientific community with the release of NCSA Telnet in 1986 A number of other tools followed and like NCSA Telnet all were made available to everyone at no cost In 1993 NCSA released the Mosaic web browser the first popular graphical Web browser which played an important part in expanding the growth of the World Wide Web NCSA Mosaic was written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina who went on to develop the Netscape Web browser Mosaic was later licensed to Spyglass Inc which provided the foundation for Internet Explorer The server complement was called NCSA HTTPd which later became known as Apache HTTP Server 16 Other notable contributions by NCSA were the black hole simulations supporting the development of LIGO in 1992 the tracking of Comet Hale Bopp in 1997 the creation of a PlayStation 2 Cluster in 2003 and the monitoring of the COVID 19 pandemic and creation of a COVID 19 vaccine 17 18 Facilities editInitially NCSA s administrative offices were in the Water Resources Building and employees were scattered across the campus NCSA is now headquartered within its own building directly north of the Siebel Center for Computer Science on the site of a former baseball field Illini Field NCSA s supercomputers are at the National Petascale Computing Facility 2 19 Movies and visualization editNCSA s visualization department is internationally well known Donna Cox leader of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at NCSA and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and her team created 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 worked with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to produce high resolution data driven visualizations of terabytes of scientific data for Black Holes The Other Side of Infinity a digital dome program on black holes Private business partners editReferred to as the Industrial Partners program when it began in 1986 NCSA s collaboration with major corporations ensured that its expertise and emerging technologies would be relevant to major challenges outside of the academic world as those challenges arose Business partners had no control over research or the disposition of its results but they were well situated to be early adopters of any benefits of the research This program is now called NCSA Industry 20 Past and current business partners include Abaqus Abbvie Allstate 7 American Airlines AT amp T Boeing Phantom Works Caterpillar 7 Dell Dow Chemical Eastman Kodak Eli Lilly amp Company ExxonMobil FMC Corporation Ford IBM Illinois Rocstar Innerlink John Deere JPMorgan Chase Kellogg s McDonnell Douglas now part of Boeing Motorola Nielsen Corporation Phillips Petroleum Company Schlumberger Sears Shell State Farm Tribune Media Company United TechnologiesSee also editBeckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology Coordinated Science Laboratory Cyberinfrastructure NCSA Brown DogReferences edit a b c NSF Special Report Cyberinfrastructure From Supercomputing to TeraGrid www nsf gov Archived from the original on 2017 08 01 Retrieved 2014 08 06 a b c Illinois State Government Press Release State Invested 60 Million to House the Blue Waters Supercomputer Retrieved 2014 08 06 Encyclopaedia Britannica University of Illinois includes the NCSA unit Retrieved 2014 08 06 NSF Press Release 11 152 XSEDE Project Brings Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Digital Services and Expertise to Nation s Scientists and Engineers Retrieved 2014 08 06 NSF Press Release 13 056 NSF Supported Blue Waters One of the World s Most Powerful Computers Is Open for Research www nsf gov Retrieved 2014 08 06 NSF Award Abstract 1261582 CIF21 DIBBs Brown Dog www nsf gov Retrieved 2014 08 06 a b c SUPERCOMPUTER LAB S QUANTUM LEAP Crain s Chicago Business 1997 06 09 Retrieved 2014 08 06 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign www ncsa illinois edu 26 June 2017 Retrieved 2017 11 06 Smarr Larry 1982 The Supercomputer Famine in American Universities in The Report of the Panel on Large Scale Computing in Science and Engineering Panel 2 Supercomputer Center Officials Federal Supercomputer Programs and Policies United States Printing Office published 1986 1985 pp 85 280 Congressional hearings of 10 June 1985 with testimony from Supercomputer Center officials Illinois Scientists Open Supercomputer Center articles latimes com January 19 1986 Retrieved 2014 08 06 NASA information on the NCSA Service Provider Archived from the original on 2016 08 13 Retrieved 2014 08 06 National Science Board Approves Funds for Petascale Computing Systems www nsf gov Retrieved 2007 08 24 Smarr Larry et al 1983 A Center for Scientific and Engineering Supercomputing PDF NSF Award 8404556 Phase II Supercomputer Center 1986 Encyclopaedia Britannica Apache Web Server originally known as NCSA HTTPd web server Retrieved 2014 08 06 NCSA s history of itself Ncsa uiuc edu 2008 08 14 Retrieved 2012 10 14 Broad William 2020 03 26 A I Versus the Coronavirus The New York Times Retrieved 2020 03 28 Building Project Info from the construction company Clayco Archived from the original on 2014 08 08 Retrieved 2014 08 06 Offering Industry and Government Solutions to Grand Challenges Retrieved 2017 11 17 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to National Center for Supercomputing Applications Official website NCSA on GitHub 40 6 53 4 N 88 13 30 0 W 40 114833 N 88 225000 W 40 114833 88 225000 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title National Center for Supercomputing Applications amp oldid 1180662248, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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