Establishment of the Centers

In 1984, once the NSF acquired additional funding from Congress for the program, NSF called for proposals to establish national supercomputer centers. Over 20 proposals were received, and these were evaluated in an extension of the usual NSF peer-review process. In February 1985, NSF selected four of the proposals and announced awards to establish four national supercomputer centers. A fifth center was added in early 1986.

The five centers are organizationally quite different. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign and the Cornell Theory Center are formally operated by the universities in which those centers are located. The JVNC is managed by a nonprofit organization, the Consortium for Scientific Computing, Inc. (CSC), established solely to operate this center. The San Diego Supercomputer Center is operated by the for-profit General Atomics Corporation and is located on the campus of the University of California at San Diego. Finally, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is run jointly by the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Westinghouse Electric Corporation. NSF established the OASC that reported directly to the Director of NSF as the NSF program office through which to fund these centers.

While the selected centers were being established (these centers were called Phase 2 centers), NSF supported an extant group of supercomputing facilities (Phase 1 centers) to start supplying cycles to the research community at the earliest possible time. Phase 1 centers included Purdue University and Colorado State University, both with installed CYBER 205 computers; and the University of Minnesota, Boeing Computer Services, and Digital Productions, Inc., all with CRAY X-MP equipment. It is interesting to note that all these centers, which had been established independent of the OASC initiative, were phased out once the Phase 2 centers were in operation. All Phase 1 centers are now defunct as service centers for the community, or they are at least transformed rather dramatically into quite different entities. Indeed, NSF "used" these facilities, supported them for a couple of years, and then set them loose to "dry up."

From the very beginning, it was evident there were insufficient funds to run all Phase 2 centers at adequate levels. In almost all cases, the centers from the beginning have been working within very tight budgets, which has resulted in difficult decisions to be made by management and a less aggressive program than the user community demands. However, with a scarce and expensive resource such as supercomputers, such limitations are not unreasonable. During the second round of funding for an additional five-year period, the NSF has concluded that the JVNC should be closed. The closing of that center will alleviate some of the fiscal pressure on the remaining four centers. Let us now focus on the JVNC story.