NCSA: An Illinois center with national reach

While the National Center for Supercomputing Applications plays an important role in enabling science and engineering discovery across the country, it is also an important part of the University of Illinois community. The center is a unique federal/state/University partnership.

In the 1980s, Illinois faculty proposed the concept of federally supported supercomputing centers for a wide range of science and engineering research. Their unsolicited proposal to the National Science Foundation led to the creation of NCSA and other centers. Since NCSA opened in 1986, the center has attracted nearly $1 billion in external funding from NSF, other federal agencies, and the private sector. In fiscal year 2010, the University of Illinois brought in $185 million in NSF grants, ranking second on a nationwide list of NSF support; 54 percent of that campus NSF funding was due to NSF grants to NCSA staff.

Illinois researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines have tapped the power of NCSA's supercomputers and the expertise of the center's staff to advance their work. Approximately 250 Illinois researchers and students use more than 20 percent of the cycles on NCSA's supercomputers each year—an impressive statistic, since access to supercomputing resources is determined by a competitive national peer-review system. In addition, 7 percent of the new Blue Waters supercomputer is reserved specifically for the Urbana-Champaign campus—that's comparable to one of the current top 20 supercomputers in the world. Use of the supercomputers is completely free for Illinois researchers and their peers across the country.

Since 1999, NCSA has provided fellowships to more than 100 Illinois faculty and research staff, putting the center's capabilities and expertise behind collaborative projects in music, art, engineering, agriculture, business, medicine, education, and other diverse disciplines. So far, Faculty Fellows hail from 40 campus units, including:

• Agricultural and Biological Engineering: Yuanhui Zhang worked with NCSA to visualize experimental data about air flow and pollutant transmission in an aircraft cabin. (Read more: More than just muscle)
• Art & Design: NCSA helped Anne D. Hedeman develop tools to analyze images of medieval manuscripts. (Watch Hedeman describe her fellowship project: Cyber Connoisseurship: Tools to Aid Understanding of the Medieval French Book Trade)
• Finance: Stephen D'Arcy explored the use of data mining software developed by NCSA to enable insurance companies to identify situations when further investigation of an auto claim is likely to lead to a claim reduction. (Read more: Homing in on suspicious insurance claims with D2K)
• Illinois State Water Survey: Hydrologist Doug Walker worked with NCSA staff to determine the best way to computationally model and predict the future of the aquifers that supply Illinois residents with fresh water.

NCSA has served as a launching pad and incubator for new campus initiatives:

• eDream (the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute) is dedicated to exploring and expressing human creativity through emergent digital technologies. Launched in 2009, eDream is led by Donna Cox, a pioneer in the field of scientific visualization who has been with NCSA since the 1980s and continues to lead the center's Advanced Visualization Laboratory.
• The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Art and Social Science (I-CHASS) offers scholars in the humanities, arts, and social sciences access to advanced computer hardware and applications, portals and tools, as well as training and assistance in using such resources to advance their scholarship.
• The Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT) combines research initiatives from across the Illinois campus with the advanced technology capabilties at NCSA to tackle challenging problems in computer science, the environment, and the arts.

NCSA attracts partnerships with Fortune 50 companies through its Private Sector Program, and also has proven to be a fertile ground for the growth of new companies. Several technologies that began at the center have been spun out into commercial products, and some of our alumni have gone on to create world-changing technologies:

• Mosaic, the first popular web browser, was introduced by NCSA in 1993 and gathered several million users in its first year.
• RiverGlass commercializes data mining and data analysis software first developed at NCSA.
• The HDF Group is a non-profit corporation that spun off from NCSA to support open-source software and non-proprietary data formats.
• Former NCSA'er Ping Fu founded Geomagic, a leader in digital shape sampling and processing.
• Several of NCSA's former student employees have gone on to launch their own technology businesses. August Knecht was an intern at NCSA for more than six years; he went on to co-found merge.fm. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim worked at NCSA. Marc Andreesseen built on his Mosaic success by launching Netscape and other multi-million-dollar ventures.

If you would like to learn more about tapping into NCSA resources or collaborating with the center, contact NCSA Executive Director Danny Powell, danny@ncsa.illinois.edu or 217-244-0633.