Six decades of trailblazing

released 01.23.08

For more than 50 years, the University of Illinois, home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, has been a pathfinder, helping guide the impact that computing and information technology have had. The Nobel Prize winners who invented the transistor and the integrated circuit walked Illinois' halls. The creator of the light-emitting diode still makes his home here. Some of the earliest supercomputers were born on the north end of campus. NCSA Mosaic™, the first widely used graphical Web browser, was built a few blocks away.

Computer Science at Illinois

1951-52    Illinois works with the U.S. Army to build ILLIAC and ORDVAC. ILLIAC is the first computer built and owned entirely by an educational institution.

1956    John Bardeen, a physics professor, wins the Nobel Prize for his work, while at Bell Labs, on the transistor. Jack Kilby, a College of Engineering alumnus, will help invent the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments two years later. He wins the Nobel Prize in 2000.

1977    Professor David Kuck and his co-workers introduce dependence graphs and analysis and transformation techniques for the graphs' computation. This influential work enables many of today's optimization algorithms.

1985    Construction begins on Cedar, a hierarchical shared-memory supercomputer. This system embodies advances in interconnects, parallelism, optimizing compilers, and parallel applications.

Computer Science Today

Researchers study:

• Computer architecture, run time systems, programming languages, and compilers for next-generation computers and computing components.
• Hardware and software aspects of parallel processing.
• Numerical techniques for approximating mathematical models of physical systems—like molecular systems, semiconductors, and solid rocket fuels—and algorithms for solving the resulting equations on high-performance computers.
• Machine learning and data mining techniques for the analysis of large data sets, including text and image processing.

Coordinated Science Laboratory

1950s    David Muller helps develop Reed-Muller canonical networks, a standardized formulation of Boolean circuits that is still used today for testing circuit design.

1960s    PLATO, the first computer-assisted instructional program in the world, is built. Precursors of email and other forms of electronic communication propagate there.

1980s    Researchers lead the theory and implementation of fault-tolerant computing systems, issues that still loom large today.

1990s    Intel's IA-64 microchips incorporate innovative technologies based on CSL's work on compilers.

CSL Today

Researchers investigate:

• Integrated circuits, including reliability problems; low-power and high-performance integrated circuits for portable systems; and alternatives to bulk silicon for microprocessors.
• Physical electronics, including the use of carbon nanotubes for transistors and quantum dots for communication applications.
• Reliable computing, including foundational theory and practical techniques for ensuring reliability and security in high-performance computers, distributed networks, and mobile communications.
• Utility computing through the Trusted ILLIAC project, which is developing a large, demonstrably trusted cluster computing platform for on-demand computing.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

1983    University of Illinois professors send an unsolicited proposal for a scientific and engineering supercomputer center to the National Science Foundation, giving rise to the NSF supercomputer centers program two years later.

1987    NCSA Telnet™, which allowed users to log in to other computers via the Internet, is released. By 1991, there are more than 100,000 users.

1993    NCSA Mosaic, the first widely used graphical Web browser, is released. More than 5,000 copies are being downloaded per month in the software's boom years.

1999    NCSA is the first NSF-sponsored center to provide more than one million normalized CPU hours of computing time to the nation's scientists and engineers. By 2006, NCSA is providing 650 million hours per year.

NCSA Today

The center provides:

• Stable, robust computing resources, enabling the nation's scientists and engineers to tackle their most demanding challenges. NCSA offers nearly 140 teraflops of computing capacity to the nation's researchers and businesses.
• Cyberenvironments, which give research communities the means to fully exploit the extraordinary cyber-resources available.
• Innovative systems research, which evaluates the performance of emerging computing systems for key scientific and engineering applications.
• Advanced visualization technologies and expertise, which give critical insights into complex systems and bring the thrill of scientific discovery to the public.