ACCESS Vol 20, No. 1, Spring 2007

The format is approximately 8.5 inches by 11 inches. [2], 29, [1] pages, including covers. Nicely illustrated front and back cover. Illustrations. The contents address in part Supercomputing in the 21st Century, Making Science Happen, Advanced Visualization, Bumble Bee evolution, Petascale Chemistry, Nanometer, Networks of Nitrogen Atoms, Cybereducation, and Persistent Infrastructure. Scarce surviving copy. This document is important not only for its specific content, but also as a benchmark for the first decade in the 21st Century of the state-of-the-art, state-of-supercomputing technology, state-of-knowledge, state-of-practice, and the state-of-professional education and development in what was then described as cybereducation. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers in the United States. NCSA is one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. The idea for NCSA and the four other supercomputer centers arose from the frustration of its founder, Larry Smarr, who wrote an influential paper, "The Supercomputer Famine in American Universities", in 1982, after having to travel to Europe in summertime to access supercomputers and conduct his research. Smarr wrote a proposal to address the future needs of scientific research. Seven other University of Illinois professors joined as co-principal investigators, and many others provided descriptions of what could be accomplished if the proposal were accepted. Known as the Black Proposal (after the color of its cover), it was submitted to the NSF in 1983. It met the NSF's mandate and its contents immediately generated excitement. However, the NSF had no organization in place to support it, and the proposal itself did not contain a clearly defined home for its implementation. The NSF established an Office of Scientific Computing in 1984 and, with strong congressional support, it announced a national competition that would fund a set of supercomputer centers like the one described in the Black Proposal. The result was that four supercomputer centers would be chartered (Cornell, Illinois, Princeton, and San Diego), with a fifth (Pittsburgh) added later. The Black Proposal was approved in 1985 and marked the foundation of NCSA, with $42,751,000 in funding from 1 January 1985 through 31 December 1989. This was also noteworthy in that the NSF's action of approving an unsolicited proposal was unprecedented. NCSA opened its doors in January 1986. In 2007, NCSA was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to build "Blue Waters", a supercomputer capable of performing quadrillions of calculations per second, a level of performance known as petascale. presumed First Edition, First printing of this issue.…