National Center for Supercomputing Applications

About the National Center for Supercomputing Applications

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. Current research focus areas include digital agriculture, bio and health sciences, earth and environment, astronomy, plus many more. The Center also provides integrated cyberinfrastructure—computing, software, data, networking, and visualization resources and expertise—that are essential to the work of scientists, engineers, and scholars at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and across the country. NCSA is also an engine of economic impact for the state and the nation, helping companies address computing and data challenges and providing hands-on training for undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs. Established in 1986 as one of the original sites of the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program, NCSA is supported by the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, the National Science Foundation, grants from other federal agencies, and funding from industry partners.

NCSA & RDA

As part of its cyberinfrastructure work, NCSA designs, builds, and operates data and software resources, often in partnership with other national and global organizations, that enable researchers and others in scholarly institutions, industry, and government to both use and contribute to the resources to answer questions. For us and our partners, collaborators, and users to be successful, we must support existing and emerging standards, such as those created by RDA, and in areas where standards don't yet exist, we must create them, working within RDA and similar organizations.

As part of the National Data Service effort that NCSA co-led, NCSA has participated in the National Data Service IG, the Data Fabric IG, and the PID IG.  NCSA also participated in the Data Type Registries WG as part of efforts such as the Brown Dog project.  

NCSA use of RDA Outputs

Clowder as described in the RDA Interoperable Data Archiving and Migration Using the RDRI Working Group Recommendations: “The RDA’s Research Data Repository Interoperability (RDRI) Working Group has proposed recommendations based on existing standards for the packaging richly annotated datasets for archiving and exchange. The communities around Dataverse and Clowder, two independent data-focused software systems that are in use today across a broad range of disciplines and in countries around the world,  have recently been provided support to upgrade their existing archiving mechanisms to conform to these recommendations and to assess the benefits and limitations of these recommendations in achieving practical interoperability. This poster outlines the data/metadata architecture of the two systems, describes the in-progress implementations of export/import functionality that leverage the recommendations and underlying standards, and discusses some preliminary interoperability findings.”