National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Encyclopedia
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
but it provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
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.
A list of NCSA hardware is available at
NCSA Capabilities
In 2007, NCSA was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
to build "Blue Waters
Blue Waters
Blue Waters is the name of a petascale supercomputer to be deployed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
", a supercomputer capable of performing 1 quadrillion calculations per second, a measure known as a petaflop.
NCSA is led by Thom Dunning, a computational chemist who previously worked at the University of Tennessee
University of Tennessee
The University of Tennessee is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville, Tennessee, United States...
, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle. ORNL is the DOE's largest science and energy laboratory. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville...
, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
, the United States Department of Energy
United States Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material...
and the Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne National Laboratory is the first science and engineering research national laboratory in the United States, receiving this designation on July 1, 1946. It is the largest national laboratory by size and scope in the Midwest...
. On Monday, August 8, 2011, the University of Illinois announced that he, along with three other professors there, was elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 161,000 members at all degree-levels and in all fields of chemistry, chemical...
. (<
History
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
's Supercomputer Centers Program.
Larry Smarr
Larry Smarr
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 in Columbia, Missouri and received a Ph.D...
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 quickly announced a national competition that would fund a set of supercomputer centers like the one described in the Black Proposal. 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.
The Black Proposal
The 'Black Proposal' was a short, ten-page proposal for the creation of a supercomputing center which 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 internet 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 around universal computer access, where 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
Visualization (graphic)
Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of man...
, workstations, high-speed I/O
I/O
I/O may refer to:* Input/output, a system of communication for information processing systems* Input-output model, an economic model of flow prediction between sectors...
, data storage, software engineering
Software engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
, and close collaboration
Collaboration
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, — for example, an intriguing endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing...
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
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
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; 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
NCSA Telnet
NCSA Telnet is an implementation of the TELNET protocol created at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1986 and continuously developed until 1995...
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
Mosaic (web browser)
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
, the first popular graphical Web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
, which played an important part in expanding the growth of the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
. NCSA Mosaic was written by Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...
and Eric Bina
Eric Bina
Eric J. Bina 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 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Bina attended...
, who went on to develop the Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
Web browser. Mosaic was later licensed to Spyglass, Inc. which provided the foundation for Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
. The server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
-complement was called NCSA HTTPd
NCSA HTTPd
NCSA HTTPd was a web server originally developed at the NCSA by Robert McCool and others. It was among the earliest web servers developed, following Tim Berners-Lee's CERN httpd, Tony Sanders' Plexus server, and some others. It was for some time the natural counterpart to the Mosaic web browser in...
.
Other notable contributions by NCSA were the Black Hole simulations supporting the development of LIGO
LIGO
LIGO, which stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a large-scale physics experiment aiming to directly detect gravitational waves. Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT,...
in 1992, the tracking of the Hale-Bopp Comet in 1997, and the creation of a PlayStation 2
PlayStation 2
The PlayStation 2 is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Sony as part of the PlayStation series. Its development was announced in March 1999 and it was first released on March 4, 2000, in Japan...
Cluster in 2003. NCSA's history of itself can be found here.
Facilities
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 ScienceUIUC Engineering Campus
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.-Bardeen Quadrangle:...
, on the site of a former baseball field, Illini Field. NCSA's supercomputers are at the National Petascale Computing Facility.
Movies/Visualization
NCSA's visualization department is maybe the most well-known sector around the country and world. 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 at Urbana-Champaign, and her team have thrilled millions of people with visualizations for the Oscar-nominated IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage," the PBS NOVANOVA (TV series)
Nova is a popular science television series from the U.S. produced by WGBH Boston. It can be seen on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries...
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
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. The program is now called the Private Sector Program.Past and current business partners include:
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See also
- CyberinfrastructureCyberinfrastructureUnited States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over...
- NCSA TelnetNCSA TelnetNCSA Telnet is an implementation of the TELNET protocol created at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1986 and continuously developed until 1995...
- NCSA HTTPdNCSA HTTPdNCSA HTTPd was a web server originally developed at the NCSA by Robert McCool and others. It was among the earliest web servers developed, following Tim Berners-Lee's CERN httpd, Tony Sanders' Plexus server, and some others. It was for some time the natural counterpart to the Mosaic web browser in...
- Mosaic (web browser)Mosaic (web browser)Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...
- The Beckman InstituteThe Beckman InstituteThe Beckman Institute is an interdisciplinary-research institute named after scientist and philanthropist Arnold O. Beckman . It is famous for imaging and other research...
- Coordinated Science Laboratory
- University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignThe University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...