The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), housed at Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall on the campus of

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

, is one of five original centers in the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

's Supercomputer Centers Program. It was formerly called the Cornell Theory Center.

Establishment

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC) was established in 1985 under the direction of Cornell Physics Professor and Nobel Laureate

Kenneth G. Wilson Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson (June 8, 1936 – June 15, 2013) was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase ...

. In 1984, the

began work on establishing five new

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

centers, including the CTC, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. In 1985, a team from the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...

began the development of

NSFNet The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The p ...

, a

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

-based computer network that could connect to the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

at Cornell University and the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universit ...

. This high-speed network, unrestricted to academic users, became a backbone to which regional networks would be connected. Initially a 56-

kbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

network, traffic on the network grew exponentially; the links were upgraded to 1.5-

Mbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

T1s in 1988 and to 45 Mbit/s in 1991. The NSFNet was a major milestone in the development of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

and its rapid growth coincided with the development of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. In the early 1990s, in addition to support from the

, the CTC received funding from the

Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

, the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

New York State New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. stat ...

, IBM Corporation, SGI, and members of the center's Corporate Research Institute. The center's focus was on developing scalable parallel computing resources for its user community and applying their expertise in parallel algorithm development and optimization to a wide range of scientific and engineering problems.

History

The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing, and its predecessor the Cornell Theory Center, deployed the first

IBM Scalable POWERparallel Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a series of supercomputers from IBM. SP systems were part of the IBM RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) family, and were also called the RS/6000 SP. The first model, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, and new model ...

System SP2 supercomputer and first

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

, and established a financial solutions center for supercomputing. Today, CAC is a partner on the National Science Foundatio
XSEDE
project, a collection of integrated digital resources and services enabling open science research. CAC is also developing training for TACC'
Frontera
supercomputer, serving as the technical lead for the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure Institute for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics
SCiMMA
project, developing software for the Institute for Research and Innovation in Software for High Energy Physics
IRIS-HEP
, and designing cyberinfrastructure for th
NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center
A 175 times faster computation of a CDC hepatitis C model on a CAC MATLAB cloud is noted in the

International Data Corporation International Data Group (IDG, Inc.) is a market intelligence and demand generation company focused on the technology industry. IDG, Inc.’s mission is centered around supporting the technology industry through research, data, marketing technol ...

's What the Exascale Era Can Provide report. CAC was an early implementer of cloud computing with the deployment of Red Cloud. CAC also designed and deployed a federated cloud calle
Aristotle
an
builds cloud images and containerizes applications
for efficiency and portability. Under th
Office of the Vice Provost for Research
CAC provides Cornell faculty, staff, and students, the national research community, and industry with a range of high performance computing and consulting services. Organizations that have participated in CAC's Partner Program include Boeing, Corning, Dell, Ford, HypoVereinsbank, Intel, Microsoft, Pfizer, and start-ups whose technologies have been acquired. The Center is under the direction o
David Lifka
an
Richard Knepper

References

External links

Official website of the Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing
{{DEFAULTSORT:Center for Advanced Computing Cornell University Cornell University buildings Supercomputer sites 1985 establishments in New York (state)