1.5.1 Supercomputer Centers

Since its beginning in 1950, the National Science Foundation (NSF)¹, the only federal agency dedicated to the support of education and research across all scientific and engineering fields, has been at the vanguard of scientific discovery - funding more than 100 Nobel Prize Winners and thousands of other accomplished scientists and engineers. To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the NSF published an overview of its history. To relate just one important discovery -- in 1985, NSF-funded researchers began measuring stratospheric ozone loss at the South Pole and in 1996, roughly 10 years later, established that the atmosphere's chemistry above Antarctica is "grossly abnormal and that levels of key chlorine compounds are greatly elevated."²

NSF support has enabled many of the advances made in computational science. For example, through its Supercomputer Centers Program begun in 1985, five supercomputing centers were established across the country that gained an international reputation for high-performance computing, visualization, and desktop software advances.

In 1997, the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program was replaced with the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance)³ at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)⁴ at the University of California San Diego, formed the two partnerships in the new PACI program.

The Alliance partnership of more than 50 academic partners from across the nation is building a prototype of the country's next-generation information and computational infrastructure, the PACI Grid, to enable scientific discovery and increasingly complex engineering design. The Grid is creating a powerful, seamless, integrated computational problem-solving environment for collaborative, multidisciplinary work on a national scale.

NPACI's mission is to advance science by creating a ubiquitous, continuous, and pervasive national computational infrastructure: the Grid. This infrastructure builds upon tremendous advances in information technology and promotes distributed science by multidisciplinary teams. Through NPACI's efforts, researchers will collect data from digital libraries and experiments, analyze the data with models run on a computational grid, visualize and share those data over the Web, and publish the results in a digital library to enrich the scientific community.

In 2000, the NSF awarded the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)⁵ a grant to develop a Terascale Computing System (TCS) that will eventually exceed six trillion operations per second (teraflops). With this announcement, PSC joined the PACI program.

What does all that mean? The PACI program engages 100's of computational scientists, computer scientists, and applications scientists from across the country to advance scientific achievements using computation through a huge computational network. The primary areas of PACI science application include:

This national partnership and multi-disciplinary approach bridges gaps that traditionally have separated mathematicians and computer and applications scientists and rapidly advances the computational science discipline as it forges a new way of doing science in the computer age.

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