OIL & GAS

CHAMPAIGN, IL — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will break ground this month on a $30 million, 142,000-square-foot building, NCSA director Dan Reed announced today. An official groundbreaking ceremony will be held at 1 p.m. Oct. 22 at the construction site, 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana. A brief ceremony will be followed by refreshments. NCSA was launched in 1986 through funding from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, and the University of Illinois. The center has grown steadily, and the approximately 400 people now employed by NCSA are housed in several buildings across the University's campus, including the Beckman Institute Advanced Science and Technology and the Computing Applications Building. "Uniting many of our people and projects at this state-of-the-art facility will enable an even greater level of collaboration and innovation," Reed said. "A building for NCSA shows that both the state of Illinois and the University are committed to our continued success and understand the value that NCSA brings to the research community, the citizens of Illinois, and the statewide technology sector." In addition to the new facility, NCSA will maintain its machine room at the Advanced Computation Building as well as a presence at Beckman and possibly other campus buildings. The site for the new building is at the corner of Clark Street and Mathews Avenue in Urbana, just north of the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science, which is slated to open this fall. The two high-tech buildings will anchor a new information technology quadrangle. State funding for the NCSA facility was approved last spring. NCSA's building—a combination of offices, research laboratories, conference space, and a large auditorium—has been designed by LZT Associates, Inc. of Peoria. The facility is targeted for completion in 2005. Scheduled to speak at the groundbreaking are Reed, Chancellor Nancy Cantor, State Sen. Rick Winkel, State Rep. Naomi Jakobsson, Vice Chancellor for Research Charles Zukoski, and other invited guests. View the NCSA building construction site: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AboutUs/NCSABuildingWebcam.html.