The Center for Research Computing — Notre Dame's computing institution

2005 – TODAY

Founded on the announcement of December 2005: The University of Notre Dame announced the creation of the Center for Research Computing on 18–19 December 2005, established, in the university's words, by the Office of Information Technologies in collaboration with the Office of Research "to build an environment that will enable Notre Dame to expand its portfolio and impact as a national research university." Dewitt Latimer, the university's assistant director of networking and operations, served as interim director; the center took the first floor of the Information Technology Center and became the university's primary interface to the Northwest Indiana Computational Grid, the regional research network joining Notre Dame, Purdue and Argonne National Laboratory. The center's own profile gives its founding year as 2006 — the announcement was December 2005, and both dates stand as their sources give them. In 2009 Jarek Nabrzyski arrived from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center to direct it, over a team of six or seven staff; the center describes itself, in the standard profiles of the trade, as a tier-two research computing center — below the handful of national supercomputing centers, and the working engine of the university's research computation.

What the institution is, in the city's terms: The CRC is the third form of the computing this record has followed — from the single UNIVAC of 1962, attended by the executive vice president, to the shared IBM mainframe of the punch-card years, to a standing center whose work is the university's research itself: high-performance computing, data services, and the training of the faculty and students who use them. That the announcement came from a partnership of the information-technology office and the research office, rather than from a single department, is the point the founders themselves made of it: by 2005 computing at Notre Dame was infrastructure, the same category of city fact as the fiber ring this section takes up below — indeed the two met, the university being a founding capital contributor to the Metronet from 2004.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame News, 18–19 December 2005 — the Center for Research Computing announced by the Office of Information Technologies and the Office of Research; housed on the first floor of the Information Technology Center; Dewitt Latimer interim director; the university's primary interface to the Northwest Indiana Computational Grid (Notre Dame, Purdue, Argonne).
2. Center for Research Computing, institutional profile (Advanced Clustering / center profiles) — the center's founding year given as 2006; Jarek Nabrzyski's arrival as director in 2009; the center's self-description as a tier-two research computing center.