The Houston Area Computational Science Consortium (HACSC) is a collaboration of three Houston institutions: Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University of Houston. These institutions have outstanding research programs in high performance computing, virtual reality, and distributed, collaborative work, and have in recent years developed strong research programs that span disciplines and institutions. In August of 1996, the National Science Foundation's NCRI/NSFNET Program for High Performance Connections awarded the HACSC a high performance connection grant to enhance its high performance networking infrastructure and to ultimately connect to the very High Speed Backbone Network Service. This grant will allow member institutions to more effectively share their computational resources.
In August of 1996, the