The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States.

[1][2] NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,[3] and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country.

NCSA computational and data environment implements a multi-architecture hardware strategy, deploying both clusters and shared memory systems to support high-end users and communities on the architectures best-suited to their requirements.

The NSF established an Office of Scientific Computing in 1984 and, with strong congressional support, it announced a national competition that would fund a set of supercomputer centers like the one described in the Black Proposal.

In this sense, the significant role played by the U.S. Government in funding the center, and the first widely popular web browser (NCSA's Mosaic), cannot be denied.

The proposal's vision of the computing future were then unusual or non-existent, but elements of it are now commonplace, such as visualization, workstations, high-speed I/O, data storage, software engineering, and close collaboration with the multi-disciplinary user community.

Reading publications from that time gives no hint that scientists were required to learn the arcane technical details of whatever computer facilities were available to them, a time-consuming limitation on their research, and an exceedingly tedious distraction from their professional interests.

The implementation of the Black Proposal had a primary role in shaping the computer technology of today, and its impact on research (both scientific and otherwise) has been profound.

The proposal's description of the leading edge of scientific research may be sobering, and the limitations on computer usage at major universities may be surprising.

Donna Cox, leader of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at NCSA and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and her team created visualizations for the Oscar-nominated IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage", the PBS NOVA episodes "Hunt for the Supertwister" and "Runaway Universe", as well as Discovery Channel documentaries and pieces for CNN and NBC Nightly News.

Cox and NCSA worked with the American Museum of Natural History to produce high-resolution visualizations for the Hayden Planetarium's 2000 Millennium show, "Passport to the Universe", and for "The Search for Life: Are We Alone?"