The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a hub of transdisciplinary research and digital scholarship where University of Illinois faculty, staff, and students, and collaborators from around the globe, unite to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA also provides integrated cyberinfrastructure—computing, data, networking, and visualization resources and expertise that are essential to the work of scientists, engineers, and scholars at the University of Illinois and across the country.
As one of the original sites on the NSFNet, which provided the backbone for the present-day Internet, NCSA has always been a production, open supercomputing facility. Making cyberinfrastructure easily accessible to our users, who run the gamut from K-12 educators to academic researchers and students to government and industrial partners, is a top priority: our endpoints—more than 5000 of them—are not hidden behind firewalls like those of corporate sites, but are accessible worldwide.
Accessibility to cyberinfrastructure is absolutely necessary to the productivity of the nation's scientific and engineering community, but such accessibility means effectively addressing and preventing system vulnerabilities. As a result, NCSA has developed broad and deep expertise in detecting and responding to attacks and intrusions of all sorts. With decades of experience designing and deploying systems that meet stringent cybersecurity requirements for serving a diverse, national scientific community, NCSA is a recognized leader in both local site and distributed systems security. NCSA's CyberSecurity research and operations are funded primarily through federal grants from the National Science Foundation.
NCSA has a long history of exploring and researching new ways to protect systems--and the researchers who use them--from cyberattacks. We've led the development of MyProxy, software that enables users to securely manage their online credentials, CILogon, a service that bridges from campus credentials to cyberinfrastructure, and Bro, a network security monitor co-developed at ICSI and NCSA that is used by Fortune 50 companies, labs and universities worldwide. NCSA is also a partner in Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.