The Computer Science Department at Illinois has long been a leader in high performance computing research.  The world's first parallel (stored program) computer was the 64-processor ILLIAC IV, whose development began in 1965 and which became operational in 1974.

A decade later the Cedar project pioneered the use of clusters of commodity multiprocessors by building a 32-processor supercomputer. This contributed to advances in interconnection networks, control unit support of parallelism, optimizing compilers, and parallel algorithms and applications.

The drive for better performance continues with current efforts in the areas of parallel computer architecture design, parallelizing compilers, concurrent programming languages, runtime software for parallel I/O and computation, and software and algorithms for applications such as rockets and molecular simulation. This work is facilitated by access to large-scale parallelism (e.g., a 768-processor Origin 2000, a 256-processor PC cluster, the 1024-processor ASCI Red) through affiliations with campus research centers like NCSA and CSAR.