National Center For Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, although it provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.

NCSA provides leading-edge computing, data storage, and visualization resources. NCSA computational and data environment implements a multi-architecture hardware strategy, deploying both clusters and shared memory systems to support high-end users and communities on the architectures best-suited to their requirements. Nearly 1,360 scientists, engineers and students used the computing and data systems at NCSA to support research in more than 830 projects. A list of NCSA hardware is available at NCSA Capabilities.

In 2007, NCSA was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to build "Blue Waters", a supercomputer capable of performing 1 quadrillion calculations per second, a measure known as a petaflop.

NCSA is led by Thom Dunning, a computational chemist who previously worked at the University of Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the United States Department of Energy and the Argonne National Laboratory. On Monday, August 8, 2011, the University of Illinois announced that he, along with three other professors there, was elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society.