New Chief At National Center For Supercomputing ApplicationsNew Chief At National Center For Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which gave birth to the Web browser that became Netscape and more recently has been a leader in computer simulations and grid computing, on Thursday named Thom Dunning its third director.

Dunning, 61, previously a chemistry professor at the University of Tennessee and a distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, will start work at the NCSA shortly after Jan. 1. He has also worked for the Department of Energy's Science Office and at two other national labs. The NCSA, a National Science Foundation-funded supercomputing center on the University of Illinois campus in Champaign, Ill., had been looking for a new director since Dan Reed, who held the post from 2000 to 2003, left in December to take a professorship at the University of North Carolina and establish a computing research center there. Rob Pennington has been the NCSA's interim director.

In a statement released by the NCSA, Dunning said he plans to engage the center in work that goes beyond "big computers and new technologies," to aim that computing power at solving nationally recognized problems in physics, chemistry, biology, visualization, and data analysis.

The NCSA was established in 1985 under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Larry Smarr, who wrote the proposal that led to an NSF-funded supercomputing program, became its first director. Smarr is currently a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego.

In 1993, the NCSA released Mosaic, a user-friendly Web browser that became the basis for Netscape Communications, which established a model for high-tech initial public offerings when it sold its first shares to the public in 1995.