National Center for Supercomputing Applications
NCSA Building, 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana, Illinois 61801.
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| Established | 1986 |
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Field of research
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cyberinfrastructure, supercomputing, cyber-resources, cyberenvironments, visualization |
| Director | Ed Seidel |
| Location | Urbana, Illinois |
| Affiliations | University of Illinois |
| Website | ncsa.illinois.edu |
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States of America. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and 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.
NCSA is led by astrophysicist Ed Seidel.
NCSA is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. 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.
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 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.
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