Governor Acknowledges National Science Foundation Award

SPRINGFIELD -- Governor George H. Ryan today lauded the National Science Foundation's (NSF) choice of recipients for the new Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF). The NSF has awarded the DTF to the collaborative proposal lead by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Argonne National Laboratory. Other partners in the DTF include the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology.

"The selection of both NCSA and Argonne National Lab for this prestigious federal award proves that Illinois remains a national and world leader in the areas of advanced supercomputing and science," said Ryan "The NSF award brings over $24 million to Illinois in the first year. This infrastructure will provide our scientists the capacity to collaborate across the country and world to discover the scientific breakthroughs for the future," said Ryan.

The DTF's hardware and software will include the world's fastest unclassified supercomputers, ultra-high speed networks, and high-resolution visualization environments. Transporting data 16 times faster than the fastest research networks now in operation, the $53 million DTF network is the largest and most comprehensive infrastructure ever assembled for scientific research. The DTF will link to other networks such as Abilene and STAR TAP, an interconnect point in Chicago that provides access to and from international research networks, which will allow hundreds of national and international researchers to be able to access the infrastructure to solve scientific problems.

"Our investment in VentureTECH, a five-year $2 billion initiative, has helped us lure this award," added Governor Ryan. "The NSF's selection shows once again the significant return on our VentureTECH investment in infrastructure, research and people."