About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provides powerful computers and expert support that help thousands of scientists and engineers across the country better understand our world.

With the computing power available at NCSA, researchers simulate how galaxies collide and merge, how proteins fold and how molecules move through the wall of a cell, how tornadoes and hurricanes form, and other complex natural and engineered phenomena.

NCSA—established in 1986 as one of the original sites of the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program—is supported by the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, the National Science Foundation, and grants from other federal agencies. The center is part of the Illinois Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies.

For more than 20 years, NCSA has been a leader in deploying robust high-performance computing resources and in working with research communities to develop new computing and software technologies. Building on this history of leadership, NCSA and its partners are at work on the Blue Waters project, which will provide the national research community with a sustained-petaflop supercomputer that is many times more powerful than the current resources available for non-classified scientific research.

The center focuses on:

• Developing and supporting powerful, reliable computing, data, and networking resources that enable researchers to solve demanding science and engineering problems. We develop and explore innovative architectures and techniques to accelerate scientific computing.
• Working with research communities to help them fully exploit the extraordinary resources available on the Internet (computing systems, data sources and stores, and tools) with cyberenvironments.
• Developing software, techniques, and tools to improve national cybersecurity and to help law enforcement better respond to cyberattacks.
• Providing insights into complex systems and sharing the thrill of scientific discovery with the broadest possible audience through artful visualizations of scientific phenomena.
• Preparing the next generation of scientists and engineers to effectively use computational tools and techniques.

Learn more about NCSA by reading answers to frequently asked questions.