The 'softer' side of NCSA

NCSA and the Mid-America Earthquake Center developed MAEviz to provide detailed predictions of the damage resulting from an earthquake, including the toll on people, infrastructure, and services. With MAEviz, “what if” models and risk-reduction strategies can be evaluated by both researchers and decision makers in an effort to avoid a catastrophic impact on society in the event of an earthquake. MAEviz integrates the latest research findings, most accurate data, and new methodologies into a single software product. Download MAEviz

The Cyberinvestigation Law Enforcement Wizard (CLEW) gives every law enforcement officer the ability to respond to computer-based crimes like an expert. An officer just plugs the CLEW USB drive into the computer under investigation and an automated tool collects evidence, including information on emails and instant messages. CLEW also suggests follow-up changes that can be made to the computer to better capture future evidence. NCSA computer security experts developed CLEW in collaboration with local, state, and federal law enforcement officers with support from the National Institute of Justice. The team is creating new features for CLEW, including support for investigations of social networking sites like Facebook.

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and developed in partnership with humanities scholars, fosters collaboration by empowering scholars to share data and research in virtual environments. This eases scholars’ access to digital research materials, which are stored in a variety of incompatible formats. SEASR supports numerical, categorical, text, and audio-based analysis of can a single text up to a million books. Download SEASR

Know what’s happening with your cluster? Get a Clu(e)! CluMon collects data from thousands of compute nodes and offers correlated views of that information via a Web interface and a Web-based API. CluMon can be expanded to deal with most any scheduler or data source for a complete, customized monitoring solution. Developed by NCSA to monitor its Linux supercomputers, CluMon is a scalable, fault-tolerant, tunable system that can work for almost any Linux supercomputer. Download CluMon

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a powerful technique for simulating everything from the development of hurricanes to the formation of galaxies to the 3D mixing of fluids at a wide range of temporal and spatial scales while maximizing computational efficiency. Visualizing this wide-ranging data is a challenge, but NCSA developed Amore to substantially improve the rendering of AMR data. Using Amore, NCSA produced data-driven visualizations of the evolution of the universe for NOVA program "Monster of the Milky Way," which debuted in October 2006.

Partiview is an interactive, mono- or stereoscopic viewer for four-dimensional datasets. It is written in C++ / OpenGL and has been compiled to run on Linux, Windows, OS X and Irix. Download Partiview

A patented virtual reality interface that enables gestural motion capture and voice control of navigation, editing, and recording for scientific visualizations, Virtual Director™ allows users to use six-degree-of-freedom input devices to interactively navigate their dataset and record and edit camera paths. The camera paths can then be fed to offline rendering software for production. Virtual Director has been used to help create several IMAX movies, digital planetarium shows, and television shows, including the Oscar-nominated IMAX film "Cosmic Voyage" (1996), Hayden Planetarium's "The Search for Life: Are We Alone?" (2002), and the PBS Nova episode "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity" (2006).

NCSA created the FLAIM framework to anonymize data from various computer and network logs. These logs provide information that can help diagnose and prevent security problems, but organizations are reluctant to share this sensitive data. FLAIM (Framework for Log Anonymization and Information Management) lets security professionals create multiple levels of anonymization, so they can share key information while keeping sensitive data safe. Download FLAIM

Email lists are a popular group communication tool. Every day, important confidential discussions take place. NCSA developed the open-source Secure Email List Services (SELS) to protect such discussions. SELS’ digital signature and encryption capabilities ensure that neither the list server nor outsiders have access to plain-text emails. SELS ican be downloaded and installed in simple and well-documented steps. List participants don’t have to install custom email clients; plugins provide compatibility with Mozilla Thunderbird, MacMail, Microsoft Outlook, Mutt, and Emacs. Download SELS

With the introduction of MyProxy, researchers no longer had to worry about keeping track of multiple passwords and logins. Initially designed as a repository for grid credentials to enable secure grid portals, MyProxy has evolved into a full-featured grid authentication solution, enabling a secure single sign-on from the TeraGrid User Portal to the 11 TeraGrid partner sites. In the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project in Europe, MyProxy facilitates renewal of credentials for long-running computations. Download MyProxy

Software developed in NCSA's early years had a big impact on the development of the World Wide Web and high-performance computing. 

In 1993 NCSA Mosaic™ broke away from the small pack of existing browsers by including features like icons, bookmarks, a more attractive, easy-to-use interface, and pictures. NCSA offered Mosaic free from its website, and soon more than 5,000 copies were being downloaded each month. Several Mosaic developers launched Netscape Navigator and more than 100 companies, including Microsoft, licensed the Mosaic software from the University of Illinois. Download Mosaic

Not only did NCSA’s software developers contribute to easy Internet searching with the development of Mosaic, they made it possible for there to be something to find with the development of the public domain HTTPd server software. Using NCSA HTTPd 1.3 as a base, several independent webmasters and members of NCSA’s server development team worked to improve the software, named it Apache, and offered it for free.  Apache is primarily used to serve both static content and dynamic web pages. Since 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the Web. According to Netcraft, as of September 2009 Apache served over 53 percent of all websites and over 66 percent of the million busiest.

In NCSA’s early days, users logged in from off-site machines through a cobbled-together system that included a cooperative network established by U.S. universities called BITNET, the National Science Foundation’s fledgling NSFNET, and even direct phone connections to the supercomputers via a 1-800 number. Just as significantly, they were starting to use personal computers to do so. It soon became clear that users needed a straightforward way of working from the distant computers, and NCSA Telnet was the center's first major software release. Telnet was popular, in part because of its integrated file transfer capability.