Arctic Region Supercomputing Center

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) was from 1993 to 2015 a research facility organized under the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Located on the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) campus, ARSC offered high-performance computing (HPC) and mass storage to the UAF and State of Alaska research communities.
In general, the research supported with ARSC resources focused on the Earth's arctic region. Common projects included arctic weather modeling, Alaskan summer smoke forecasting, arctic sea ice analysis and tracking, Arctic Ocean systems, volcanic ash plume prediction, and tsunami forecasting and modeling.
ARSC was a Distributed Center (DC), an Allocated Distributed Center (ADC) and then one of six DoD Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs) of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) from 1993 through 2011.
History.
ARSC hosted a variety of HPC systems many of which were listed as among the Top 500 most powerful in the world. For more than 10 years ARSC maintained the standing of at least one system on the Top 500 list. Funding for ARSC operations was primarily supplied by the DoD HPCMP, with augmentation through UAF and external grants and contracts from various sources such as the National Science Foundation. In December 2010, the "Fairbanks Daily News-Miner" reported probable layoffs for most of Arctic Region Supercomputer Center's 46 employees with the loss of its Department of Defense contract in 2011. The article reported that 95 percent of ARSC funding comes from the Department of Defense. When that DoD funding source was lost ARSC could no longer afford computers that could be listed on the Top 500 List.
The following timeline includes various HPC systems acquired by ARSC and a Top 500 list standing when appropriate: