National Computational Science Alliance

Fall 1983. Larry Smarr, then a professor in the University of Illinois astronomy and physics departments, writes a proposal to the National Science Foundation requesting a supercomputer for the U of I campus.

There is no NSF-funded supercomputing program at this time.

1984. NSF establishes its Office for Advanced Scientific Computing (OASC) and initiates a nationwide competition for national supercomputing center proposals.

March 1985. NCSA is established under a five year, $20 million NSF grant. Larry Smarr is named director of the new center.

August 1985. NCSA takes delivery of its first supercomputer—a Cray X-MP/24.

January 1986. NCSA opens to the national user community.

August 1986. Eastman Kodak becomes the first NCSA Industrial Partner.

November 1986. NCSA's first supercomputer, the Cray X-MP/24), is replaced by the Cray X-MP/48. With the jump in capacity and power, NCSA is delivering about 2,000 CPU-hours per month.

April 1987. A formal scientific visualization program begins at NCSA.

Fall 1987. NCSA Telnet, the center's first major software release, makes its debut. By 1991 it has more than 100,000 users.

Spring 1988. NCSA's Hierarchical Data Format is released. HDF, now in version 5, allows researchers to use a mix of computers and to transport large amounts of data among many different computers.

May 1988. NCSA's 100th employee is hired. Within a year, number 200 is added to the roster.

October 1988. The Cray-2 supercomputer is installed. It has four processors and can perform about 1.7 billion calculations per second. At the time of its installation, about 3,000 researchers are associated with NCSA.

April 1989. NCSA's Renaissance Experimental Laboratory is established with a grant of 25 SGI IRIS workstations from Jim Clark.

August 1989. The Thinking Machine CM-2 supercomputer, NCSA's first foray into massively parallel computing, is installed.
 

History: the 1990s

1990. The first version of NCSA Habanero is released. This collaborative environment allows people to interact and work together over the Internet.

October 1990. The Cray Y-MP supercomputer replaces the Cray X-MP vector computer. The new multiprocessor system has eight times the memory of the X-MP.

Spring 1991. Fortune magazine's profiles of "25 Who Help the U.S. Win" include NCSA Director Larry Smarr. The issue focuses on innovators who are helping revitalize American industry.

April 1992. A Thinking Machine CM-5 supercomputer is installed. It has 512 nodes and eight gigabytes of memory.

April 1992. NCSA recognizes Eli Lilly and Company with its first Industrial Grand Challenge Award. The award was created to recognize companies in the NCSA Industrial Program that accomplish competitive breakthrough applications as a result of their partnerships with NCSA.

April 1993. NCSA Mosaic™, the first user friendly Web browser, is released. At the time, there are about 200 World Wide Web servers in the world. By 1994 Mosaic has several million users and has effectively given birth to the dot.com industry that is projected to be worth $1 trillion by 2001.

April-October 1994. Three new systems are installed. The Convex Exemplar has 8 processors and a peak speed of 1.6 gigaflops. The SGI POWER CHALLENGEarray has 32 processors, and its cousin, the SGI POWER CHALLENGE has 16 processors and a peak speed of 4.6 gigaflops.

1995. I-WAY, an experimental high-performance network, debuts at SC95, linking 60 large-scale scientific applications on the show floor. I-WAY is the forerunner to the computational and information infrastructure later called the Grid.

1996. NCSA researchers release Biology Workbench, a Web interface that allows biologists, students and teachers to easily access bioinformatic tools and databases.

August 1996. The IMAX film Cosmic Voyage, the first ever to use four minutes of research-quality visualization, debuts at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The visualizations use Virtual Director, software created by NCSA's Donna Cox and Robert Patterson that allows users to navigate through complex datasets and choreograph with a virtual camera.

October 1996. A 128-processor SGI Origin2000 supercomputer is installed. Its peak speed is about 50 gigaflops.

March 1997. NSF announces that the National Computational Science Alliance, with NCSA as its leading-edge site, has been selected as one of two sites for the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure Program (PACI).

October 1997. The Alliance becomes a reality. A partnership of some 50 institutions across the country, it is charged with prototyping a national technology Grid. The Alliance is funded through a five-year NSF grant.

Summer 1998. NCSA develops prototype of D2K, a data mining tool with the ability to analyze large scale data from multiple heterogeneous data sources.

November 1998. The Alliance's NT Supercluster debuts at SC98. Using the High Performance Virtual Machine software, developed by Andrew Chien, the cluster consists of almost 200 workstation processors.

November 1998. Newsweek magazine names Champaign-Urbana one of the world's "Hottest Tech Cities." NCSA and UIUC are mentioned prominently in the article.

October 1999. More than one million hours are provided to 736 users on the Alliance's SGI Origin2000 array at NCSA. This record marks the first time that more than one million hours have ever been used in a single month on any NSF-supported high-performance computing system.

Winter 1999. NCSA develops HDDI, a text mining tool that automatically creates hierarchical indexes of large, distributed free-form textual databases.