37. The PACI Program - Nifty 50
Helping to revolutionize the way computational science is carried out, NSF has created the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program.
Leading the PACI program are two supporting partnerships that help pioneer the technology that will underpin the future of e-commerce: the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI).
Leading edge facilities
Each partnership consists of a leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California-San Diego and a significant number of other partners.
In addition, there are more than 60 geographically distributed partner institutions from 27 states and the District of Columbia associated with either NCSA or NPACI or both. The two leading-edge sites - together with the partners who support smaller versions of these computers and which provide access to experimental systems - constitute a distributed, metacomputing environment connected via high-speed networks.
The partners contribute to the infrastructure by developing, applying and testing the necessary software, tools and algorithms that contribute to the further growth of this national grid of interconnected, high-performance computing systems.
Original publication date: April 2000