Networked Computing for the 21st Century CIC R&D Highlights -- PACI

	Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) Alliance Partners The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)
Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI)	NSF's PACI program, led by NCSA -- headquartered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- and NPACI -- located at the University of California, San Diego -- will enable the U.S. to maintain its lead in computational science, furthering the use of computing systems in all disciplines of research and providing new educational opportunities for students ranging from K-12 through advanced degree programs.   NCSA envisions a distributed environment whose goal is to prototype a national information infrastructure that enables the best computational research in the country. The Alliance is organized into four major groups: Application Technologies Teams that drive technology development; Enabling Technologies Teams that convert computer science research into usable tools and infrastructure; Regional Partners with advanced and mid-level computing resources that help distribute the technology to sites throughout the U.S.; and Education, Outreach, and Training Teams that will educate the population and promote the use of the technology to various sectors of society. The leading-edge site at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will support a variety of high end machines and architectures that will enable high end computation for scientists and engineers across the country.   NPACI includes a national-scale metacomputing environment with diverse hardware and high end sites. In addition to supporting the computational needs of high end scientists and engineers across the country via a variety of leading-edge machines and architectures at the University of California-San Diego, NPACI will foster the transfer of technologies and tools developed by applications and computer scientists for use by these high end users. Major focus areas are data-intensive computing, digital libraries, and large data set manipulation across multiple disciplines, including engineering and the social sciences, supported by partners across the country.
National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA)	NCSA is a partnership among computational scientists, computer scientists, and professionals in education, outreach, and training at more than 50 U.S. universities and research institutions. NCSA's national technology grid -- a prototype of the computational and information infrastructure of the 21st century -- will consist of a broad range of high end parallel computing systems located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other leading-edge facilities within the Alliance.
Alliance partners	Most NCSA partners are university and Government laboratories. Researchers at these institutions will build the technology for the grid and disseminate it to user communities across the Nation. Federal and industrial partners and strategic vendors test new technologies and provide feedback on industrial and commercial potential.
Research partners	Alabama Supercomputer Authority American Indian Higher Education Consortium Argonne National Laboratory Arizona State University BBN Systems and Technologies Boston University California State University - San Diego California Technical University center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology (CARB) Committee on Institutional Cooperation Computing Research Association EPSCoR Foundation Georgia Institute of Technology Indiana University Jet Propulsion Laboratories Kitt Peak National Observatory Krell Institute Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)/National Energy          Research Supercomputer center Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Maryland Virtual High School of Science and Math Massachusetts Institute of Technology Montana State University National Radio Astronomy Observatory North Carolina State University North Carolina Supercomputing center North Central Regional Education Laboratory Northwestern University Ohio State University Ohio Supercomputer center Old Dominion University Oregon State University Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNL)/Environmental Molecular          Sciences Laboratory Princeton University Purdue University Rice University Rutgers University Salk Institute Shodor Education Foundation South Dakota State University Southeastern Universities Research Association Stanford University State University of New York - Albany Syracuse University The Scripps Research Institute University of Alabama - Huntsville University of Arizona University of California - Berkeley University of California - Davis University of California - Irvine University of California - Los Angeles University of California - Santa Barbara University of California - Santa Cruz University of California - San Diego University of California - San Francisco University of Houston University of Illinois - Chicago University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign University of Iowa University of Kansas University of Kentucky University of Maryland University of Massachusetts University of Michigan University of Minnesota University of New Mexico/Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research Program/          Maui High Performance Computing center University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill University of Oregon University of Pennsylvania University of Pittsburgh University of Southern California University of Tennessee University of Texas - Austin University of Utah University of Virginia University of Washington University of Wisconsin - Madison Virginia Technical University Washington University in St. Louis
Industrial Partners	Fifteen Fortune 500 corporations are partnering with NCSA to preview of emerging technologies: Corporation Fortune 500 Industrial Sector   Allstate Insurance Company*   Insurance   Boeing Company*   Aerospace   Caterpillar Inc.*   Industrial and farm equipment   Eastman Kodak Company*   Scientific and photographic equipment   Eli Lilly and Company*   Pharmaceuticals   FMC Corporation   Agricultural chemicals/diversified   Ford Motor Company   Automobiles   J.P. Morgan*   Banking/finance   Motorola, Inc.*   Electronics   Phillips Petroleum Co.   Petroleum and support   SABRE Group, Inc.   Transportation   Schlumberger Ltd.*   Petroleum and support   Sears, Roebuck and Co.*   General merchandise   Shell Oil Company*   Petroleum and support   Tribune Company*   Information/entertainment * Have signed letters of intent to join the Alliance industrial partnership
Strategic vendors	Commercial vendors include major computing, communications, and software companies that work closely with Alliance partners to develop and evaluate early prototypes of hardware, software, and services. The partnerships are between individual institutions rather than with the Alliance.   Ameritech Computer Associates Hewlett-Packard Company/Convex Technology center IBM Corporation Microsoft Corporation Platform Computing Corporation The Portland Group, Inc. Pyramid Systems, Inc. Silicon Graphics, Inc./Cray Research Sun Microsystems
Federal partners	NCSA and Federal agencies are developing and applying advanced technologies in Government. Federal partners include:   Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program World Wide Web Federal Consortium Department of Energy Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative
The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)	NPACI is creating a ubiquitous, continuous, and pervasive computational infrastructure to support interdisciplinary research by the national community that will help maintain U.S. world leadership in scientific advancement and economic progress. NPACI's aim is to make this infrastructure -- consisting of disparate platforms linked into progressively higher performance systems -- transparent, easy to use, and available everywhere.   Led by the University of California - San Diego (UCSD) and building on the foundation of the San Diego Supercomputing center (SDSC), NPACI includes 37 of the Nation's academic and research institutions, located in 18 states. Driven by applications needs, NPACI is developing a software infrastructure to link high performance computers, data servers, and archival storage systems to aggregate computing power. Development work is focused in HECC thrust areas that leverage separately funded research projects to ensure rapid deployment and robustness of the resulting infrastructure. This work is complemented by education, outreach, and training programs and collaborations with industry.
Resource partners	NPACI consists of resource and research and education partners as well as associate and industrial partners:   UCSD/SDSC California Institute of Technology University of California - Berkeley University of California - Davis University of California - Los Angeles University of California - Santa Barbara University of Houston/Keck (with Baylor and Rice Universities) University of Maryland University of Michigan University of Texas Washington University in St. Louis
Research and education partners	California State University center for Research on Parallel Computation LTER/University of New Mexico Oregon State University Rutgers University Salk Institute Stanford University The Scripps Research Institute University of California - Santa Cruz University of Kansas University of Southern California University of Tennessee University of Virginia University of Wisconsin
Associate partners	NPACI associate partners provide additional linkages or share infrastructure requirements:   CARB EPSCoR Foundation JPL Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) LANL LBL/NERSC LLNL Montana State University PNL/Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) University of California - Irvine University of California - San Francisco University of Massachusetts University of Pennsylvania
NPACI industrial partners	NPACI industrial partners help determine the research agenda of NPACI and provide substantial cost sharing. Their involvement builds on the following collaborations: SGI/Cray and UCSD are integrating Cray's GigaRing technology into a heterogeneous computing environment. Hewlett-Packard/Convex and Caltech are enhancing Convex's system software to support large cache-coherent domains. IBM and UCSD are continuing their collaboration to integrate object-relational database systems with mass storage systems and develop a Massive Data Analysis Testbed. Sun Microsystems is continuing its collaborations with UC Berkeley on Network of Workstations (NOW) technology and with UCSD on security. It has initiated a new collaboration with UCSD to demonstrate the effectiveness of Sun technology for data serving. DEC and UCSD continue to explore using the NT operating system as an alternative to Unix in a scientific setting. Seagate, other leading disk manufacturers, and UCSD will study disk reliability using UCSD's multi-TByte storage resources as a testbed.