National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure

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This action executes a cooperative agreement between NSF and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) at the University of California - San Diego (UCSD), under the direction of Dr. Sid Karin via NSF award ASC 9619020. The cooperative agreement will be operational for a period of five years and is the result of a proposal submitted to NSF solicitation, "Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure" (PACI), NSF 96-31. The PACI program builds on and replaces the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program established in 1985 The program focuses on newly emerging opportunities in high performance computing and communications, providing flexibility, both to adapt to rapidly evolving circumstances and to meet the need for high-end computation, in order to enable continued U.S. world leadership in computational science and engineering. NSF, through this program, will provide access for researchers to high performance computing systems, with associated highly trained staff and researchers necessary to develop and optimize their use. The emergence of scalable parallel systems, high performance networking and high bandwidth and large capacity mass storage systems creates the opportunity for a national infrastructure consisting of a number of geographically distributed sites strongly coupled to high end computational resources and to each other via high speed communications networks. NPACI will lead the deployment and evolution of a national-scale metacomputing environment that will benefit the national user community in all fields of computational science and engineering. This infrastructure will integrate compute and data servers, and employ the talents of computer and computational scientists to guide its evolution. It will leverage the activities of many projects. The metacomputing environment will be extended to enable not only numerically intensive but also data-intensive computing. To that end, infrastructure will be developed and deployed to enable analysis of extremely large data collections from application output, remote-sensing and instrumentation-derived data, and data in widely scattered, discipline-specific databases. Three technology areas which are central to creating a metacomputing environment will initially be the basis for NPACI: Adaptable, Scalable Tools/Environments; Data-intensive Computing; and Interaction Environments. Several scientific applications have also been chosen that will motivate, guide, and validate development and integration of the NPACI infrastructure. Molecular Science, Neuroscience, Earth Systems Science, and Engineering will initially be focused on as areas ripe for scientific discovery and technology development. NPACI will integrate computational science and engineering education activities into the infrastructure, building on successful education and outreach efforts within the partnership. Particular emphasis will be placed on outreach to underrepresented minorities, women, and new communities. The Partnership will concentrate on providing advanced hardware, enabling technology, leading edge work in application technology, education, training and outreach. Included in this award is the first incremental payment to UCSD and its partners for FY98 which covers general operating expenses including equipment.