Now that the newly upgraded Blue Waters supercomputer is up and running, what does the future hold for NCSA? Over at the News Gazzette, Julie Wurth has posted an interview with NCSA’s new incoming director, H. Edward Seidel.
NCSA will need to be the best it can be to continue to compete with other centers and attract the large funding streams needed to support supercomputers at the national leadership level in an increasingly tight fiscal climate. It will also have to navigate a paradigm shift in scientific computing from big, big supercomputers to solve certain classes of problems to so-called “Big Data,” that encompasses the much larger world of problems facing research and society. With such a strong campus behind it, I am confident that NCSA will not only do well, it can help set directions for the future. As for Blue Waters, it is an incredibly powerful tool for science. Illinois is one of the few universities in the world that has the capacity to support such a facility. It will be very important to harness the strengths of the research teams across the nation who use it to make the case that such large investments need to continue for computational science to advance.
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