Cornell University Center For Advanced Computing - History

History

The CTC was established in 1985 under the direction of Nobel Laureate and supercomputing visionary Kenneth Wilson, who was a Cornell Physics professor. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer 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 began the development of NSFNet, a TCP/IP-based computer network that could connect to the ARPANET, at the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This high-speed network, unrestricted to academic users, became a backbone to which regional networks would be connected. Initially a 56-kbit/s network, traffic on the network grew exponentially; the links were upgraded to 1.5-Mbit/s T1s in 1988 and to 45 Mbit/s in 1991. The NSFNet was a major milestone in the development of the Internet and its rapid growth coincided with the development of the World Wide Web. In the mid 1990s, in addition to support from the National Science Foundation, the CTC received funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, New York State, IBM Corporation, and other members of the center's Corporate Research Institute.

In 2007 the CTC was reorganized and renamed in a move designed to make its high-performance computing resources more efficient and effective for the university's researchers and to take advantage of growing opportunities for research funding. As part of the reorganization, the CAC reports directly to the Office of the Vice Provost for Research instead of being a part of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science. David Lifka, who previously served as the CTC's director of high-performance and innovative computing, became CAC Director.