Anita K. Jones,
Computer Science Professor and University Professor,
University of Virginia;
Former External Advisory Committee member,
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The CRPC has been nothing short of spectacular. When the history of
information technology research in the 20th century is written,
supercomputing will be chronicled as one of the prominent successes.
And the CRPC will stand, with only a few other peers, as a key
contributor to the success of what we called supercomputing.
The CRPC has been a continual source of tools and libraries that
helped application programmers tame those irascible vector and
multiprocessor architectures. Without those tools and without the
many real applications that CRPC researchers made run, and run well,
what we now call high performance computing would not be widely
usable, and would not be affordable.
The CRPC is a constellation of star individuals and of sites. The CRPC team was among the first to show the world how computational collaboration among multiple sites could really work. Thinking back on the history of the CRPC, I recall that it started with a shotgun marriage. Rice and Caltech had submitted separate proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Center program. NSF "encouraged" them to get together. They won. But, I remember too that building the distributed team was very difficult. At one point we on the External Advisory Committee feared that "the marriage was on the rocks." But those concerned decided that this center was going to succeed. The principals formed a team with Ken Kennedy as their strong and visionary leader. And since then, researchers from its seven sites and nine affiliated sites have made major and pivotal contributions to the art and the practice of high-performance computation. This center and its principals have the respect and admiration of their colleagues around the world.
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