NCSA Repositions for the Next Decade: New Logo

The stylized "S" with the small spheres at each end represents the network connecting remote client computers to NCSA's scalable supercomputer servers used for computation and information processing. The "globe" at the center of the "S" represents the global connectedness of the Web. The "S" also represents NCSA's ongoing commitment to providing access to the greatest capability of supercomputers to the nation's researchers. NCSA expects to reach a teraflop before the end of this decade.

NCSA is pleased to announce a modified logo that represents the natural development of our Center. As the title of the recent National Research Council's study of the HPCC Program implies, the government is "Evolving the HPCC Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure." Emphasis is on evolving-NCSA is becoming a national focal point for the fusion of HPCC technologies with the emerging NII.

This evolution is in keeping with the original vision of a distributed computational system to support basic research outlined in the 1981 NSF study "Prospectus for Computational Physics":

"We propose a distributed computational physics system in which a number of computational facilities are tied together on an information network. The principal node of the network will contain a supercomputer providing the greatest possible capability. The other nodes will contain medium-scale computers to provide capacity, advanced graphics devices for an effective man- machine interface. . . . The central facility will also play a major role in developing software and software standards, the design and expansion of the system, and system management and resources allocation."

This prescient statement was made before either the widespread use of personal computers or the creation of the NSFnet. NCSA grew out of this vision-always starting the design of its national architecture from the remote user's desktop computer. Software development to tie the researcher's computer to others on the emerging Internet began immediately with the creation of NCSA Telnet. More recently, NCSA Mosaic has added a much higher level of functionality. Finally, the victory of the microprocessor on the desktop is now sweeping upward through the computational pyramid so that NCSA's supercomputers and WWW information servers are themselves constructed from networks of microprocessors- identical to those in users' computers.

National supercomputer centers are emerging, as the 1981 NSF report envisioned, as "principal nodes" seamlessly embedded in the NII. To better represent this connectedness, NCSA is altering its logo to include the "globe S" from the NCSA Mosaic interface.

In the coming decade, NCSA is committed to maintaining and strengthening its leadership position through both its HPCC activities, with emphasis on the Grand Challenges, and its NII activities, with emphasis on the National Challenges. In fact, the NII is intimately linked to HPCC; that is, HPCC technologies enable the NII. For example:

• NCSA's Web server is a network of Hewlett-Packard workstations that acts as a parallel supercomputer (with a peak speed of 2.4 Gflops). This "supercomputer" handles 4 million connections per week from remote users throughout the world.

• For a few weeks in March, the largest national user of NCSA's SGI Power Challenge was Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona, a participant in the University of Illinois' Digital Library testbed. He was creating a new kind of index to 400,000 abstracts of papers in the INSPEC database by creating a co-occurrence matrix to find out what terms typically appeared near other terms in a large body of literature in a certain discipline. This approach is impossible without supercomputers and yields a very different sort of indexing from the traditional keyword, or Dewey, classification system.

• Roy Campbell, Dan Reed, and Andrew Chien of the UIUC Department of Computer Science and their students have worked with NCSA to create a research prototype Video Enhanced Mosaic and modified Web browser that allows for digital video streams to be sent from Web repositories to browsers. NCSA is investigating modifying its SGI Challenge parallel supercomputer from a "front end" for computational scientists to a multimedia database server that can handle large numbers of digital video segments to support large scientific databases.

• Dan Reed has also done exhaustive performance analysis of 150 million connections to NCSA's WWW server. He has categorized the bottlenecks in WWW server design involving I/O, memory bandwidth, CPU, caching, etc. Reed visualized this vast database (the history of some 50 variables) in NCSA's CAVE by plotting an ensemble of triads of data history. One can visually move through the ensemble and "blow up" an interesting triad and watch the evolution through the database of the history of connections.

• NCSA held its first workshop on commercial and financial applications for its thirteen Industrial Partners. A popular new start for NCSA has emerged as data mining using intelligent algorithms (neural nets, genetic algorithms, pattern recognition) on NCSA's large-memory Thinking Machines CM-5 and NCSA's scalable shared-memory supercomputers (SGI POWERCHALLENGEARRAY, CONVEX Exemplar, and CRAY SUPERSERVER CS6400). Advanced information visualization will be possible using interactive flythroughs with our CAVE, ImmersaDesk, and NII/Wall.

• The Berkeley-Maryland-Illinois Millimeter Radio Telescope Array (BIMA) is an NSF-funded Grand Challenge using the HPCC BLANCA testbed to connect radio dishes in California with "scalable computer lenses" at NCSA. BIMA generates a digital library of images which is, in turn, a data source for a NASA-funded grant to develop a software infrastructure that will enable access to Earth and space image databases for the public and K-12 schools.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Larry Smarr was a member of both national study groups mentioned above.