Editing Appendix/Ramblings/MyDoctoralStudents (section)

===Creation of NSF Supercomputing Centers===

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Taken from &sect;1.2.2 of the 1995 [https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1996/nsf9646/nsf9646.htm#_ftnref4 ''Report of the Task Force on the Future of the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program'']:

<font color="darkgreen">Four Centers<sup>*</sup> were established in 1985, and a fifth added in 1986, all providing “vector supercomputing services” for the research community and training for the many researchers who lacked experience with these systems.  These Centers were points of convergence where researchers learned to think in the new computational paradigm and to explore new vistas in resolution, accuracy, and parametric description of their problems.</font>

<font color="darkgreen">Experiments in allocating resources, developing software support services, and starting standardized graphics and database descriptions to accelerate scientific visualization were all initiated during this phase.</font>

<font color="darkgreen">Additionally, each Center established relationships with universities, both geographically close and far, to form consortia of members who had a stake in the resources of the Centers and in their future development.  An important feature of these relationships was the formation of peer-review allocation boards, in which experts in computational science could direct attention to the performance of user’s computer codes.  Special attention was given to improvements of those codes with low performance.  Direct interactions with experts at the Centers frequently facilitated significant performance improvements.</font>

<sup>*</sup>Footnote [4]:  <font color="darkgreen">The original four centers were (1) The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, (2) The Cornell Theory Center (CTC), (3) The John von Neuman Center (JvNC), a consortium located at Princeton University, (4) The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), located at the University of California, San Diego and operated by General Atomics.  The fifth &#8212; added in 1986 &#8212; was the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), directed by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University and operated by Westinghouse.</font>
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