2001

Gov. Murphy J. “Mike” Foster asks the Louisiana Legislature to appropriate funds as a commitment to the Vision 20/20 plan specifically for Information Technology development. The Legislature authorizes $25 million for Gov. Foster’s IT Initiative, with $9 million going to LSU.

Under the Governor’s IT Initiative, LSU creates the Center for Applied Information Technology and Learning (LSU CAPITAL) to improve information technology on campus. LSU physics professor Joel Tohline serves as interim director.

Spring 2002

LSU CAPITAL funds upgrades to LSU’s computer network to make the whole campus operate on gigabit Ethernet for faster connectivity.

Fall 2002

LSU, through LSU CAPITAL, acquires its first supercomputer, named SuperMike. At the time, SuperMike is the second-fastest computer among academic institutions worldwide.

LSU CAPITAL funds the Securities Markets Analysis Research and Trading Lab (SMART Lab) at the E. J. Ourso College of Business Administration. The SMART Lab simulates an interactive trading floor, which allows students to gain experience in the fast-paced world of securities analysis, research and trading.

August 2003

LSU hires world-renowned astrophysicist and scientist Ed Seidel to implement his vision for a fully interdisciplinary research center as LSU CAPITAL’s director. Under Seidel’s direction, LSU researchers from all departments across campus access the advanced cyberinfrastructure available on campus to enable breakthroughs in computational science, physics, digital art, animation and other areas. The center is renamed the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT.

September 2004

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco commits $40 million throughout a 10-year period to fund the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, a high-speed, fiber optic network that connects supercomputers around the state for increased research collaboration and economic development potential. CCT Director Ed Seidel, CCT Assistant Director for Computing Applications Gabrielle Allen and CCT Chief Technology Officer Charlie McMahon co-authored the white paper that envisioned LONI and how it would benefit the state.

January 2005

LSU purchases Nemeaux, one of the only supercomputers dedicated specifically for arts and humanities research, to be used in CCT’s Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technologies.

April 2005

CCT hosts the first Red Stick International Animation Festival, now an annual event, to showcase the links between art and technology.

June 2005

The Legislature allocates an additional $2 million in annual funding to LSU to support the CCT.

July 2005

LSU is one of 20 institutions the National Science Foundation selects to host an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, or IGERT, program. CCT hosts the IGERT on Computational Fluid Dynamics at LSU.

June 2006

The Legislature allocates $10 million in funding for Queen Bee, the computer that will be the LONI centerpiece, as well as for the Dell clusters that will be installed at each partner site’s supercomputer.

LSU announces plans to purchase Tezpur, a new supercomputer that will replace SuperMike. With more than 15 teraflops of capacity, Tezpur will be three times faster than SuperMike.

November 2006

CCT Director Ed Seidel receives the Sidney Fernbach Award, one of the most prestigious honors in computational science, for his work in applying high-performance computing in novel ways to advance studies in numerical relativity.

January 2007

CCT and LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Thomas Sterling premiers his “High-Performance Computing: Models, Methods and Means” course. This course is the first of its kind in the United States, broadcasting the lessons in high-definition video across high-speed networks to four other universities in the state, around the country and internationally.

April 2007

CCT appoints its first Chief Scientist, LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Thomas Sterling. CCT also appoints LONI Executive Director Charlie McMahon as its first Chief Technology Officer.

April 2007

CCT researchers celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Cactus Computational Toolkit. Many of the researchers who created the program now work at the CCT.

May 2007

Six Louisiana universities, with LSU/CCT as the lead, receive funding under the Louisiana Board of Regents’ Post-Katrina Support Fund Initiative to create the LONI Institute, an innovative research environment that allows multi-disciplinary collaboration across the universities.

Louisiana researchers submitted their most comprehensive Research Infrastructure Improvement Proposal to date, launching the CyberTools project. This project integrates research in biological and environmental transport processes as well as in biosensors, with development of comprehensive cyberinfrastructure. CyberTools, a National Science Foundation project, will create advanced information services, data management and a storage environment to support Louisiana’s research base for advanced collaboration in science and engineering. Through the CyberTools component, researchers are organized into four modular Work Packages (WP): WP 1: Scheduling and Data Services; WP 2: Information Services and Portals; WP 3: Visualization Services; and WP 4: Application Services and Toolkits. These Work Packages will enable scheduling to share computational, network, data, and visualization resources, allow better data management, leveraging the PetaShare distributed data system, ease development of complex simulation codes for modern computing environments and improve visualization capabilities in distributed computing environments, exploiting optical networks.

June 2007

The Legislature allocates $15 million for a high-performance computing equipment center to be built on LSU’s campus. Each legislative session since its inception, LSU/CCT has received additional funding for its programs and activities.

Staff with CCT and LSU Information Technology Services dismantled SuperMike, LSU’s old supercomputer to install Tezpur. Tezpur, which is one of the most powerful supercomputers owned by a university, will be an integral part of allowing CCT researchers to use LONI.

Summer 2007

CCT researchers host two summer camps for high-school students. The first, a digital arts and technology camp, taught students the basics of animation and digital media. The second, a high-performance computing boot camp, taught students the basics of building and using supercomputing clusters.

Fall 2007

Tezpur became operational.

CCT funds a project through CCT and LSU Information Technology Services to upgrade campus visualization resources and provide three tiers of visualization assistance for students, faculty and staff at the University.

October 2007

The National Science Foundation selects Queen Bee, the LONI centerpiece computer and the 23rd most powerful supercomputer in the world, to become a research partner site in Tera Grid, a nationwide, National Science Foundation-funded research infrastructure that incorporates high-performance computing resources across the country. Through Queen Bee, the state will allocate resources to support a national research community.

November 2007

LSU Office for Research and Economic Development awards funding for the first three multidisciplinary hiring initiatives at the University. One of these is a Computational Science initiative, which CCT Associate Director for Computing Applications and LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Gabrielle Allen led. Through this initiative, LSU will recruit faculty with expertise in scientific visualization, modeling and other computational science applications for solving complex problems. The ultimate goal is to strengthen the state's IT-based workforce.

Spring Semester 2008

CCT hires Jarek Nabrzyski as its executive director, to guide strategic goal development and implementation for the center.  

Feb. 1, 2008

LONI welcomes the first TeraGrid users through its centerpiece computer, Queen Bee. 

March 2008

LSU Office for Research and Economic Development funds AVATAR: Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, a multidisciplinary hiring initiative led by CCT and LSU School of Music Professor Stephen David Beck. AVATAR establishes a university-wide faculty focus on the intersections among art, technology and computation, creating new research areas in virtual environments, digital art, electro-acoustic music, animation, video game design, scientific visualization and more. AVATAR will bring six new faculty to LSU to conduct research primarily in intelligent and responsive systems -- video games, training systems and simulation visualizations -- and collaborative digital media arts. 

May 2008

LSU names 100 outstanding research and creative faculty as its first group of University “Rainmakers,” selecting those who are nationally and internationally recognized for innovative research and creative scholarship, who compete for external funding at the highest levels and who attract and mentor exceptional graduate students. Ten faculty members of the Center for Computation & Technology are included among the first group of LSU Rainmakers. They are: Ed Seidel, Jagannathan 'Ram' Ramanujam, Joel Tohline, Jorge Pullin, Sitharama Iyengar, Rudy Hirschheim, Stephen David Beck, Sue Brenner, Sumanta Acharya and Thomas Sterling.

June 2008

The National Science Foundation selects Edward Seidel as its director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, where he will oversee advances in supercomputing, high-speed networking, data storage and software development on a national level.  While directing the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure, Seidel will retain his faculty positions as well as his affiliation with CCT at LSU.

  August 2008

Electronic Arts Inc., or EA, the world’s leading independent video game developer and publisher, announces plans to build its North American quality assurance and testing center in LSU’s South Campus complex. This center creates 20 full-time jobs and more than 200 part-time jobs, many of which will be occupied by LSU students, with an annual payroll of $5.7 million throughout the next two years. EA notes strong education and research efforts at LSU, including the AVATAR initiative and Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium along with other CCT research areas, were a strong factor in the company's decision to locate in Louisiana.

 August 2008

The National Science Foundation selects Daniel S. Katz,  CCT and LSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as TeraGrid GIG (Grid Infrastructure Group) Director of Science, where he will work with the national user community to ensure TeraGrid is adequately serving their needs and fulfilling its responsibilities as the backbone of U.S. cyberinfrastructure.

Fall Semester 2008

The CCT Cultural Computing Focus Area forms a campus-wide Virtual Worlds Research Group. This group encompasses faculty from disciplines and departments across the University who are interested in using virtual environments such as Second Life, MultiVerse and Croquet for their research or teaching. CCT Cultural Computing's LSU in Second Life virtual campus is an integral part of the group's activities.