ARLINGTON, VA -- The National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) launched its Affiliates Program today when Evgeny Velikhov a partnership agreement making the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow the first member of the new Alliance Affiliates program.

The signing ceremony took place this morning at the Alliance Center for Collaboration, Education, Science and Software (ACCESS) in Arlington, VA. Velikhov, perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for Russian science today, is president of the Kurchatov Institute and the former vice president of the Russian Academy of Science. He has been an informal advisor to Russian presidents on science and technology issues and is the driving force behind the development of the Russian Internet as a tool for science and education.

The Kurchatov Institute is a premier Russian science institute and has a nationwide scope. Velikhov is in the U.S. for several weeks and arranged a visit to ACCESS to learn more about Alliance initiatives and to experience technologies such as the Access Grid and the ImmersaDesk virtual reality system.

"Both the Alliance and the Kurchatov Institute are national scientific research institutions and both will benefit from this collaboration," said Dan Reed, director of the Alliance and it's leading edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. "We believe this partnership will further the goals of global science, research, and education, and the development of an advanced communications and information infrastructure for its support."

The Alliance Affiliates program gives institutions that are not part of the Alliance partnership, including institutions outside the U.S., the chance to participate in the Alliance's efforts to develop and deploy a Grid-based computing infrastructure and related emerging technologies. Specifically, the program aims to develop collaborative projects that further the Alliance's development and deployment efforts and to transfer knowledge about Alliance technologies to groups that are not member institutions in the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program.

Through its partnership with the Alliance, the Kurchatov Institute and the Russian Institute for Public Networking, which operates the primary Internet backbone for Russian R&D, will have the chance to work with the Alliance to explore opportunities for collaboration between the U.S. and Russian research communities. Collaborative projects could involve a wide range of disciplines including physics, nuclear science, computational science, information science and technology, space science, distance learning, visualization, and advanced networking.

Another goal of the Alliance-Kurchatov Institute collaboration will be to extend the Russian research community's access to U.S. researchers via advanced networks designed to link the U.S. and Russian scientific communities. Greg Cole, one of the principal investigators with the U.S.-Russian MIRnet program recently moved from the University of Tennessee to NCSA, based at ACCESS. Cole said the new relationship "will open up many areas of cooperation, especially in computational science and advanced networking."

MIRnet is a joint U.S.-Russian project to provide high-performance networking services to link the U.S. and Russian science communities.

Leaders of the Alliance and the Kurchatov Institute will meet at least once a year to review progress made by the partnership and to discuss new initiatives. The initial partnership runs through April 17, 2003.

For more information about the Alliance Affiliates program contact Radha Nandkumar at radha@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

For more on MIRnet see http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/mirnet/home.html. 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.

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.

Contact:
Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
ph: +1.217.265.0748

Reprinted from Access Online Courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.