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The NCSA Cybersecurity team received four grants—two for continuing work, and two for starting new projects, all within a 24-hour period. At the beginning of September, Alex Withers, senior security engin ...

Catalogs of galaxies and stars derived from the data collected during the Dark Energy Survey’s science verification season prior to beginning official observations have been released to the public. Astronomer ...

A new study led by research from University of Illinois physics professor Klaus Schulten offers atomic-level details of the molecular machinery that allows swimming bacteria to sense their environment and chang ...

To accelerate advancements in the rapidly emerging field of big data analysis, the National Science Foundation has given $5 million to establish four regional Big Data Hubs. The University of Illinois at Urbana ...

Congressman Darin LaHood (IL-18) welcomed Dr. Edward Seidel to Capitol Hill to testify on a review of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Serving as a witness to ...

A 24-minute, high-resolution science documentary about the dynamics of the Sun that features data-driven visualizations produced by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University o ...

U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) convened a celebration in honor of the second birthday of NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer, which is used by scientists and engineers across the country to tackle challenging re ...

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $2 million over five years to the NCSA to bring together members of the international research community, including graduate students, post-docs, and early ...

Creating an infrastructure supporting data from across all disciplines of science, engineering, and humanities so that researchers can easily find, reuse, and publish data in a world where researchers generate ...

On January 15, H. Edward Seidel, the senior vice president of research and innovation at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, has been named the director of the National Center for Superc ...

NCSA’s Image and Spatial Data Analysis division, partnering with faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Boston University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will dev ...

Commencement is a time rich in both tradition and anticipation for the future. Although a vital icon of tradition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Alma Mater sculpture, is absent in body, ...

The Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entered production, meaning the behemoth capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and working with quadrill ...

NCSA’s cybersecurity group is collaborating with Indiana University to form the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure (CTSC) using a newly funded three-year, $4.297 million grant from the ...

A team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications created data-driven scientific visualizations of Hurricane Katrina and the harsh terrain of Venus for “Dynamic Earth,” a new immersive d ...

The National Science Foundation funded a partnership of 17 institutions to create the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project for five years, at $121 million. XSEDE will be the mos ...

NCSA deployed a 22-teraflop high-performance computing cluster, dubbed iForge, dedicated exclusively to the center’s Private Sector Partners, such as Rolls-Royce, Boeing, and Caterpillar. “iForge is ...

With guidance from ECE professor Wen-mei Hwu, CS professor Bill Gropp, and cluster experts at NCSA, students got hands-on experience building their own supercomputer with NVIDIA graphics-processing units. When ...

More than 1,000 people visited the University of Illinois’ National Petascale Computing Facility, touring the state-of-the-art building and learning more about the supercomputers it will house. The buildi ...

“Hubble 3D” takes viewers through distant galaxies as it tells the story of the repair and upgrade of the Hubble telescope. While most of the film is shot with IMAX 3D cameras, including live-action ...

Von Welch, Randy Butler, and Jim Basney of NCSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate receive a three year $1,750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to integrate, deploy, and support an open-source, sta ...

The Cyprus Institute and NCSA establishes the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) at the Cyprus Institute. The center provides high-performance computing resources to researchers ...

NCSA) and the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have received more than $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support development of a data processin ...

Installation began on a new computational resource at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lincoln will deliver peak performance of 47.5 teraflops and is designed to push the envelope in the ...

Extending more than 50 years of supercomputing leadership, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced to build the world’s firs ...

NCSA will give a powerful boost to researchers in academia and industry with the addition of two new supercomputing clusters. The two systems, Abe and T3, will provide 110 teraflops (trillions of calculations p ...

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $5 million grant to a five-year project designed to improve chemistry education in rural schools throughout Illinois. Partnering on the project are NCSA, the Colleg ...

It’s a simple little virus—so simple that biologists often refer to it as a “particle” rather than organism, so small and primitive that it can only proliferate in a cell that’s al ...

For the first time, NCSA has a home to call its own on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On Jan. 25, NCSA held an official dedication for its new 142,000-square-foot building at 1205 ...

The Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (CHASS), a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and NCSA, will foster innovation by engaging humanists, artists, and so ...

NCSA received a grant of $2 million to lead a two-year intensive effort to develop a roadmap for CLEANER, the Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research. The goal of CLEAN ...

NCSA added 6.5 teraflops of computing power to its machine room with the installation of a Silicon Graphics shared-memory, symmetric multi-processor (SMP) computing system, visualization capability, and storage ...

“As an accomplished, respected discipline scientist, Thom Dunning has developed research and leadership skills that are well-suited to achieving NCSA’s mission of enabling scientific discovery,̶ ...

There are numerous communities out there clamoring for concentrated support as they build cyberinfrastructure for their practitioners, but someone has to lead the way. In 2001, the National Science Foundation s ...

In a world where the software, the hardware, and the networks are complicated enough, there needs to be a special focus on issues relating to data and how to get the most out of that data on the burgeoning cybe ...

The PBS TV series ‘NOVA’ focused on the search for understanding nature’s most violent tornadoes, from daredevil storm chasing in tornado alley to simulating severe weather with the computatio ...

The first computing systems of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid project are in production mode, making 4.5 teraflops of distributed computing power available to scientists across the country who ...

Donna Cox—an acclaimed artist and a senior research scientist at NCSA—presented her keynote speech, “Beyond Computing: The Search for Creativity,” at SC2003, the international conference ...

Tungsten, a cluster with more than 1,450 dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers running Red Hat Linux, a Myrinet 2000 high-speed interconnect fabric, and an I/O subcluster with more than 120 terabytes of Da ...

Illinois officials broke ground for a $30 million, 142,000-square-foot building for NCSA staff and researchers. The center has grown steadily, and the approximately 400 people employed by NCSA are housed in sev ...

A new national cybersecurity research center, funded by the Office of Naval Research and led by NCSA, started up in 2003. The National Center for Advanced Secure Systems Research (NCASSR) was launched with an i ...

When Sony released its PlayStation2 (PS2) game console in 2000, demand far outstripped supply, with eager gamers and desperate parents bidding up to $1,000 on eBay for scarce units. When Sony later released the ...

Daniel A. Reed, director of NCSA, is among the 25 information technology experts President George W. Bush appointed as members of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). The mem ...

NCSA’s IBM POWER4 p690 supercomputer, capable of performing two trillion operations per second, becomes available to the general scientific research community. The POWER4 p690 consists of 384 1.3 GHz proc ...

The TeraGrid—the nation’s most powerful unclassified computers, scientific applications and visualization environments, datastores and toolkits for grid computing linked by the world’s fastest ...

The National Science Foundation’s $35 million Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF) award expands the TeraGrid to five sites: NCSA; the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, ...

The cluster, named Titan, was the world’s largest Itanium cluster, consisting of 160 dual-processor IBM IntelliStation machines. Titan had a peak performance of 1 trillion calculations per second (1 teraf ...

On Wednesday, Sept. 5, more than 500 people came to ACB on the U of I campus to officially open the two-story, 18,029-square-foot addition to the building, dedicate NCSA’s first Itanium-based Linux cluste ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $53 million to four U.S. research institutions to build and deploy a distributed terascale facility (DTF). The DTF will be the largest, most comprehensive infra ...

Rob Pennington, NCSA’s then-Chief Technical Officer, always says that he and his team want to be involved with new architectures and computing technologies when vendors “have nothing to show us but ...

“The transition really began on the first business day of 2000. Larry Smarr walked into my office, closed the door, and said ‘We need to talk.’ At that point, I knew my life was about to chang ...

In what one researcher called one of “the largest Grid computing successes for the Alliance” to date, researchers at National Computational Science Alliance partners University of Iowa and Argonne N ...

August 1999 marked the first time usage of a National Science Foundation high-performance computer topped one million normalized CPU hours in one month. According to figures from Quantum Research, which measure ...

Since NCSA launched its fellowship program in 1999, more than 100 University of Illinois researchers have benefited from close collaboration with the center’s expert staff and access to high-performance compu ...

At the height of the tech surge that marked the late 19902, Newsweek asked: “Can any place ever hope to match the awesome success of Silicon Valley?” It then proceeded to answer its own question by ...

In 1998, Andrew Chien, then a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science and a member of the Alliance Parallel Computing Team, and his research group worked with staff from NCSA to c ...

On the morning after delivering a State of the Union message that emphasized the importance of education, President Clinton spoke to a packed house at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall on the Urbana-Cham ...

NCSA received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide a distributed application support center for users developing new capabilities using NSF’s very high performance Back ...

Thanks to a system from NCSA for rapidly processing radio wavelength images from the BIMA Array radio telescope, astronomers tracing the path of Comet Hale-Bopp proclaimed their 1997 observations of the comet a ...

The National Science Foundation’s Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure initiative funded two massive programs, one led by NCSA and the other by the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Their ...

Larry Smarr, then-NCSA director and a pioneer in the movement to dramatically increase the number of academic and industrial researchers using supercomputers, was appointed as a member of the White House Adviso ...

NCSA’s SGI/Cray Origin2000, the largest Origin server and the first 128-processor system, was delivered by Silicon Graphics in October 1996. The 128 processors initially were doubled to 256 processors bef ...

NCSA not only sponsored the High-Performance Computing Challenge at SC95, the annual supercomputing conference, a team led by those from the center won it in the “Best Integration of Heterogeneous Applica ...

By the end of 1994 NCSA removed its traditional vector machines—the Cray Y-MP and CONVEX C3880—leaving machines based solely on microprocessor hardware. The center utilized microprocessor-based syst ...

The idea was as simple as it was obvious: NASA wanted a single file format for the data that would stream in from the variety of instruments that would be part of the agency’s Earth Observing Satellite pr ...

There were in fact days when even technical powerhouses like the American Association for the Advancement of Science did things the old-fashioned way. Typed or word processed manuscripts shuttled among publishe ...

The first middle-school girls to participate in the program are in their 30s now, which demonstrates the longevity and popularity of Girls Engaged in Math and Science (GEMS). GEMS (originally called Engaging Yo ...

It’s a common quandary for automobile manufacturers: Clean air laws require reductions in pollutants and increases in fuel efficiency, while market pressures push for new designs on faster timelines. Denn ...

People had created Web browsers before. In fact Tim Berners-Lee, who first conceived of the World Wide Web while working at CERN, built a rudimentary one himself in 1990. Prior to anyone at NCSA putting down a ...

As funding and construction of the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatories got under way, NCSA researchers were already hard at work, defining the gravitationa ...

A radical Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) redesign, the CM-5 employed off-the-shelf SPARC processors with four 64-bit vector units added on. It was the first large scale “massively parallel” com ...

NCSA users solved more complex problems with the arrival of a large-memory, eight-processor CONVEX C3880 supercomputer. Replacing the CONVEX C240, the CONVEX C3880 became the new center of NCSA’s Numerica ...

David Herron of Eli Lilly and Company harnessed high-performance computing to aid the fight against asthma from the moment the company joined NCSA’s Industrial Program, now the Private Sector Program, in ...

Sever Tipei, a professor in the University of Illinois’ School of Music, saw a connection that, he said, had been lost on many people since the days of the Renaissance. He saw music and computation as sha ...

Mummies don’t make their way to Central Illinois that often; when one does, you hate to destroy it while unraveling its secrets. The University of Illinois’ World Heritage Museum received a donated ...

The CONVEX C240 system—with 1 billion bytes of memory, and 50,000 calculations per second—came online in early 1991. The C240 formed the heart of NCSA’s Numerical Laboratory, a research and de ...

The 4-processor, 1.3 billion calculations per second Cray Y-MP arrived and was put into production late 1990, replacing the Cray X-MP. By the time it retired, over 6,200 researchers and their students performed ...

The animations and visualizations that NCSA created in the late 1980s aided dozens of researchers. Their impact multiplied when, in 1990, the center built a top-flight digital post-production suite. The facilit ...

Not all forest fires are bad. They play a vital role in the dynamics of forest evolution, transforming fallen plant material to essential nutrients that leach into the soil, opening the canopy so seedlings can ...

Though the center was begun with a straightforward mission to provide computing time to the nation’s scientists and engineers, innovative new systems have always been on the machine room floor, too. ̶ ...

Bob Wilhelmson, NCSA’s former Chief Science Officer, had no problem generating simulations that spawn tornadoes. In the late 1980s, however, a wicked thunderstorm that threatened to spawn a tornado was th ...

NCSA now has two Cray supercomputers to meet the rapidly increasing national demand for computational power in a wide range of fields. The Cray-2 system joins the Cray X-MP supercomputer to contribute advances ...

Scientific computing can be a messy business. “We were constantly encountering problems of different computing platforms having different data formats,” said Mike Folk, who has been with NCSA since ...

Around the halls of NCSA, he was affectionately referred to as “The Sponge.” University of Illinois physics professor John Kogut, who had been one of the co-principal investigators on the initial pr ...

The way researchers–and everyday people–use computational resources is often as important as the resources themselves. “NCSA had a workstation support group since well before I got here,” ...

From the earliest days, NCSA’s leadership saw the power of working with industry-leading corporations. Close partnerships guaranteed that the technologies emerging from the center and the expertise that m ...

NCSA opened its doors to the national scientific computing community in January 1986. Since then, the bottom line has always been helping researchers get their work done and propel science toward its next disco ...