History of RCAC
The Purdue University Computing Center (PUCC) was established in the early 1960s to provide research and academic computing facilities to the faculty, researchers, and students of Purdue University. With early roots in computing facilities for the Engineering and Mathematical disciplines, Purdue launched the very first Computer Science department in the nation at the West Lafayette, Indiana campus in 1962. Starting in those early years, Purdue became one of the leading research computing institutions in the world. Numerous scientific breakthroughs have been made using the computing facilities maintained by the staff of the Purdue Computer Center. Over the years, numerous computing systems, supercomputers, and high-performance computing systems have been installed and decommissioned to support the ever-changing research and academic computing needs of the campus.
In 2001, a new combined IT unit was formed called the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, combining PUCC, Management Information (MI), and the Telephone Office (TEL) units into a single new department. The new IT unit was named Information Technology at Purdue - IT@P or ITaP. The PUCC and MI department names were no longer used from that point on. In 2023, the academic IT units and the regional campus IT units were combined with ITaP to form a new Purdue IT organization. This site is an archive of the history, photos, and stories of the people that contributed to the creation and success of the Computing Center. Some of the pioneers in early computing trace their roots to Purdue and the Purdue Computing Center. Some came as faculty members and researchers. Others came as students and staff members. Others came later to learn from these computing pioneers and build on what they had started. Like many, we have fond memories of our time at Purdue and at PUCC.
The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) operates all centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. A division of Purdue IT, the Rosen Center gets its name in memory of Saul Rosen, who served as director of Purdue's Computing Center from 1968 to 1987 and who helped to establish Purdue as a pioneering academic institution in high-performance computing.