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. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois 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 Bill Gropp.
History
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.
So i 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. 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.
In 2007, NCSA was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to build "Blue Waters", a supercomputer capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second, a level of performance known as petascale.
Black Proposal
The 'Black Proposal' 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.