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["Greg Wood" <>]

Contact: Karen Green, NCSA Public Information Officer, 217.265.0748,


***Alliance Hosts 21st Century Technology Road Shows***
***Chautauquas revive an American Forum for a New Era***

CHAMPAIGN, IL, May 18, 1999 -- The National Computational Science Alliance
(Alliance) will host three technology road shows this summer designed to
demonstrate to researchers, educators and students how emerging
technologies and the developing National Technology Grid will change the
way people communicate, learn, and conduct research and business in the
21st century.

The three events are scheduled for Aug.  9 and 10 at the University of New
Mexico in Albuquerque (co-hosted by the University of Kansas), Aug. 23 and
24 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and Sept. 13 at 14 at Boston
University. They are being called Chautauquas, a Seneca Indian word meaning
meeting or gathering. The original Chautauqua movement started in the late
19th century, when traveling educational meetings were used to  introduce
new concepts and cultural realities of the industrial revolution to an
increasingly diverse American population.

Today the information revolution has created a similar need to disseminate
information about new technologies and concepts. Alliance Chautauquas 99
are designed to introduce new audiences to the National Technology Grid,
the prototype of the next century's information infrastructure which is
being developed by the Alliance, and demonstrate how technological
innovations can be used on the Grid in ways that will impact science,
education, business and government.

"For the last two years the Alliance has been in the business of developing
and experimenting with a new digital community, which five or 10 years down
the road will be the norm for everyone," said Larry Smarr, director of the
Alliance and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the leading-edge site for
the Alliance. "The Chautauquas give us a chance to share these developments
with a wider group of university researchers and educators. We hope that
these meetings will stimulate the growth of the nationwide digital research
community that will drive scientific research and technology development in
the 21st century."

Each Chautauqua site will serve as an access point to the Grid, offering
several presentations that will be multicast from remote sites. The remote
presentations are part of the Alliance's comprehensive plan to deploy sites
as Grid access points and to coordinate research and training activities at
these sites with the new Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education,
Science and Software (ACCESS) in Arlington, VA.

Each Chautauqua will target key groups located in specific regions of the
country. The University of New Mexico Chautauqua will target Native
American colleges, researchers from government laboratories and regional
institutions that are part of the Experimental Program to Stimulate
Competitive Research (EPSCoR), a National Science Foundation program to
stimulate research in states that have traditionally received few research
dollars. The University of Kentucky will focus on EPSCoR institutions as
well as the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), a
consortium of 41 universities in 13 southeastern states, and institutions
with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium of
major Midwestern and Big 10 universities. Boston University will also
target regional EPSCoR and CIC institutions, as well as other East Coast
academic institutions.

"The Chautauquas will highlight research and educational initiatives
specific to each region," said Frank Gilfeather, director of the University
of New Mexico's Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center and team lead
of the Alliance's Partners for Advanced Computational Services (PACS),
which is sponsoring the events. "But the Chautauquas will also be national
in scope because they will highlight the Alliance's vision to link
researchers with each other and with tools and technologies via the
National Technology Grid. "

Events at all three Chautauquas will focus on the Alliance's three key
initiatives, which are:
· capability computing, or computing "superjobs" that require dedicated use
of supercomputing power;
· the evolution of networks into a ubiquitous Grid complete with software
and middleware that allows people to interact in collaborative virtual
spaces;
· the emergence of a scientific common portal architecture, which will give
researchers access to each other and all the tools they need for their work
through simple mouse clicks.

Each Chautauqua will feature a keynote address from Smarr and an address by
an NSF representative. The Chautauquas will also feature targeted tutorials
and events including a tutorial on scientific computing on a Linux cluster
and a seminar on high-performance computing and the arts.

For details on the Chautauquas, including registration information, visit
the Alliance Chautauqua website at
(http://alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu/chautauqua).

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the leading-edge
site for the National Computational Science Alliance. NCSA is a leader in
the development and deployment of cutting-edge high-performance computing,
networking, and information technologies. The National Science Foundation,
the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and
other federal agencies fund NCSA.

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype
an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes
more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from
across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by
the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational
Infrastructure (PACI) program, and receives cost-sharing at partner
institutions. NSF also supports the National Partnership for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), led by the San Diego Supercomputer
Center

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