AI and Facilities for Frontier Science
We build and operate the cyberinfrastructure behind the largest scientific instruments, and we are making it a place where AI agents can work, trusted to help run the facility and able to carry a physicist's analysis from question to result.
Our name comes from Nicholas Metropolis (SB’36, PhD’41). At Los Alamos he led the team that built the MANIAC I, operational in 1952, and he later said he had chosen its acronym, Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer, in the hope of ending the fashion for such names. In 1957 he returned to Chicago as founding director of the Institute for Computer Research, where the solid-state MANIAC III ran from 1961 at the University’s new Computation Center on Ellis Avenue.
We like the lineage. The MANIAC I ran the first Monte Carlo calculations, the method that still underpins every LHC simulation, and the MANIAC III was a machine built by physicists so that physicists could compute. That is still the job.
