Alphabet Soup (STC, CRPC, CITI)

If you've been wondering what all those abbreviations mean, this should help.

• STC - The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Science and Technology Centers (STC) Program in 1987. The objective, in response to rising global competition, was to mount an innovative, interdisciplinary attack in important areas of basic research. The first STCs were established in 1989, more were added in 1991, and in a few short years they have grown from a new idea into a vital network of programs.

• CRPC - The Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), a $22.9 million NSF Science and Technology Center, is a research consortium of seven participating institutions: Argonne National Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Syracuse University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Texas, and Rice University. CRPC resources are available to the research community at Rice. The goal of the CRPC is to make massively parallel computer systems truly usable for scientists and engineers--at least as usable as conventional supercomputer systems are today.

• CITI - The goal of the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) is to foster interdisciplinary research in the creation, manipulation, transmission, and reception of information, concentrating on three specific areas of research: robotics, distributed computing, and parallel computation. CITI's faculty are drawn from the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computational and Applied Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Chemical Engineering, Geology/Geophysics, Space Physics, Linguistics and Semiotics, and Psychology. More than one hundred graduate students are advised by the approximately sixty faculty members who make up CITI.