National Computational Science Alliance

This action executes a cooperative agreement between NSF and the National Computational Science Alliance (the Alliance) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), under the direction of Dr. Larry Smarr via NSF award ASC 9619019. The cooperative agreement will be operational for a period of five years and is the result of a proposal submitted to NSF solicitation, “Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure” (PACI), NSF 96-31. The PACI program builds on and replaces the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program established in 1985. The program focuses on newly emerging opportunities in high-performance computing and communications, providing flexibility, both to adapt to rapidly evolving circumstances and to meet the need for high-end computation, in order to enable continued U.S. world leadership in computational science and engineering. NSF, through this program, will provide access for researchers to high-performance computing systems, with associated highly trained staff and researchers necessary to develop and optimize their use. The emergence of scalable parallel systems, high-performance networking, and high bandwidth and large capacity mass storage systems creates the opportunity for a national infrastructure consisting of a number of geographically distributed sites strongly coupled to high-end computational resources and to each other via high-speed communications networks. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has joined with its partners to create an Alliance whose principal mission is the integration of the many computational, visualization and information resources into a national-scale “Grid”. The Grid links the Alliance together and provides access to its wide variety of resources to the national scientific research community. Using high-performance networking the Grid will link the highest performing systems to mid-range versions of these architectures, and then to the end user’s workstations, thereby creating a national Power-Grid. The Alliance Grid will interconnect dozens of visualization and virtual reality displays, massive data stores, and remote instruments, while Alliance developed software “glue” that unifies them for collaborative problem-solving. The Alliance will also create integrating structures for information and resources distributed on the Grid, making its content useful for education, training, and outreach. Special emphasis will be placed on outreach to underrepresented minorities, women, and other pertinent areas. The partnership members have been chosen because of their individual commitments to work together as a team, enabling advances to be achieved by a new level of national-scale multidisciplinary collaborative research. The Alliance will concentrate on providing advanced hardware, enabling technology, leading-edge work in application technology, education, training, and outreach. Included in this award is the first incremental payment to UIUC and its partners for FY98 which covers general operating expenses including equipment.