The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance (the Alliance, see http://alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu/), a consortium that was recently funded under NSF’s Partnerships in Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. PACI also funded the National Partnership in Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputing Center. Key components of both partnerships are a leading edge site, advanced hardware partners, teams of enabling technology and applications technology partners, and a joint education, outreach and training program. Both partnerships include leading universities and research centers from around the nation.
The goal of the Alliance is to prototype the national computational technology grid, the infrastructure for high performance computing and communications for the next century. To do this, we have assembled leading edge computing centers to be the supernodes of the grid; applications technology teams to specify the requirements for the grid; enabling technologies teams to design the grid; education, outreach and training teams to assemble content for the country to access through the grid; partners in advanced computing services to support the grid; and industrial partners and strategic vendors to receive technology transfer from the grid.
The PACI program and the NSF vBNS initiative are mutually interdependent. A map of the vBNS nodes and PACI sites reveals the relationship between access to high performance networks and leading edge technology development. However, if this map is compared with a map of the EPSCoR states, it is clear that the networking needs of these states must be addressed in order to further their competitive research goals. NCSA is proud to have EPSCoR as a formal partner in our Alliance, and intends to work with EPSCoR to support networked applications.
In looking back at Internet history, one can see that the early history of the internet began with the development of the theory of packet switching networks in the 1960s and the establishment of ARPAnet in the 70s. The Internet middle ages saw the development of multiple networks in the early 1980s, with commercial development taking over in the late 80s, and NSFnet reaching T3 speeds in the early 90s. Recent internet history saw the development of three "stars", the World Wide Web, Java, and NT in the late 80s. The World Wide Web evolved to a point-and-click with the distribution of NCSA Mosaic in 1993, and the internet began moving from the office to the living room in the mid-90s. Indeed, projections of current trends would have everyone on the planet an internet user by 2001.
Today, advanced networks promise to make high-bandwidth applications like NCSA’s CAVE virtual environment available to researchers around the country. The Next Generation Internet (NGI, see http://www.ngi.gov) provides federal funding for high performance network technology development, advanced network service technologies, and revolutionary applications. The vBNS is being upgraded to OC-12, 622 Mbit/second this year. Universities have formed a consortium, UCAID (see http://www.ucaid.edu ) , that is committed to high performance networking in the long term and uses the vBNS as a backbone. NSF is funding sites to connect to the vBNS through its Connections program (see NSF Program Announcement 96-64). Sixty-three have been funded so far, with an additional 64 promised in July. The Connections program provides up to $350/year for two years for these connections. This often does not cover the entire cost of the connection. MREN provides a good example of how a number of educational institutions have banded together to connect to a common aggregation point in order to obtain vBNS access. STAR-TAP is an international program that also uses a common access point to bring international connections together. ( See http://www.startap.net )
In order to enable users to take advantage of these high performance connections, NCSA has just obtained funding for a Distributed Applications Support Team (DAST, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCD/DAST/ ) that will provide consulting, training, and support for networked applications development. Examples of the kinds of applications development possible include collaborative applications like the chemical engineering habanero application (see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero/ ). The biology workbench (see http://biology.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ ) provides a web-based interface to networked databases for the structural biology community. A virtual environments Chesapeake Bay simulation has been successfully shared between NCSA and the Army Waterways Experimental Station (http://www.wes.hpc.mil/pet/CEWES/SV/SV_frame.html) (see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Vis/Projects/Chesapeake/ ). Virtual reality has also been exploited for collaborative design of equipment and laboratory spaces. Networked instruments efforts utilizing high performance networks include work with the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland array of radiotelescopes ( see http://monet.astro.uiuc.edu) and with instrumental imaging groups at UCSF, Berkeley and the University of Illinois Beckman Institute (see http://mayflower.ncsa.uiuc.edu/) . These have led to a successful education effort for K-12, "Chickscope", which allows students to study chick embryo development by steering MRI experiments via the web.
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