National Center for Supercomputing Applications
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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program and a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Work began in January 1986.
NCSA is now headquartered within its own building, simply referred to as the NCSA Building, after being scattered around the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chiefly at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. 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.
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.
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Supercomputing capabilities
NCSA houses multiple supercomputing systems, a few of which maintain 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. That's 15.3 trillion floating point operations per second!
Important discoveries and recent work done
NCSA has recently used its supercomputers to help out in real world situations, such as video conferencing with loved ones and show visualizations of big storms. NCSA even borrowed Sony's PlayStation 2 video game console to make a computer cluster.
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. To read more about it, click here: [1]
PS2 Clusters
The scientists at NCSA even made a computer cluster out of a bunch of PlayStation 2 consoles. Even the BBC picked up on it: [2]
Movies/Visualization
NCSA's visualization department is maybe the most well-known sector around the country and world. They've made movies using the supercomputers - one of these was shown on PBS' show NOVA. To read a story about it, click here: [3]
Timeline
See the history of NCSA's inception, growth and overall impact on science and engineering in its 20-year history at [4]
Private business partners
Some of the companies that do business with NCSA: - Allstate - Boeing - Caterpillar Inc. - Dell Inc. - Exxon Mobil - IBM - Motorola
Thom Dunning, Director
Thom Dunning, the Director of NCSA, has quite a list of achievements and leadership positions within different technological groups across the country. Dunning first went to college at the University of Missouri-Rolla, a well-known engineering school. After that, Dunning went on to get his PhD at the California Institute of Technology. Later, Dunning went on to work at the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the United States Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory.
To check out his whole bio, click here: [5]
In broad terms, NCSA fulfills a responsibility in providing cyber-resources, as well as deploying cyberenvironments and innovative computing systems.
Other well-known past NCSA projects:
- NCSA Telnet
- NCSA HTTPd
External links
Template:University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus
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