The Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) was established in 1989 with a commitment to making parallel computer systems truly usable for scientists and engineers. One of the 11 original NSF Science and Technology Centers, the CRPC is a research consortium of six participating institutions:
Much has been accomplished since the CRPC's establishment. New software tools have been developed along with new parallel algorithms and prototype implementations of scientific application programs. Educational, outreach, and applications programs have achieved the CRPC's goal of distributing these ideas and technologies to the outside community. In the coming years, researchers will build upon this development and concentrate on massive parallelism and architecture independence.
The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University has a special role in CRPC, to co-ordinate the HPCC applications project activities and to track their usage of CRPC technologies. NPAC is also involved in building "roadmaps" and navigation aids to HPCC technology as part of the National HPCC Software Exchange, which is a major CRPC project to provide a repository for HPCC software and information.
You can read more about the CRPC in the Brochure "Making Parallel Computing Truly Usable", available from CRPC at Rice.
More information is also available from some articles from the CRPC newsletter Parallel Computing Research.