The Holland Computing Center (HCC) is one of the largest supercomputing facilities in the nation.  It resides at the Peter Kiewit Institute on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  The Center hosts Firefly, a supercomputer cluster (with 5,600 processors) capable of a sustainable computation rate of more than 20 trillion floating point operations per second (20 TFlops).  When planned upgrades are completed later this year, the sustainable rate will exceed 60 TFlops.

The mission of the Center is to explore and exploit the substantial competitive and transformative advantages of Firefly's leading-edge computational power with academic, government and commercial researchers, scientists and students at the University of Nebraska and in the Midwest Region.  This high performance computing center encourages the educational and research initiatives of University faculty, students and business partners, and reinforces the position of the Peter Kiewit Institute at the University of Nebraska as one of the nation's leaders in information science technology and engineering.

Very large systems like Firefly are used not to increase computational speed by 10% or increase problem sizes by 20%, but rather to do what-if computations which were not even in researchers' wildest dreams before.  These programs are used to model the real world, and to see what happens when this change and/or that perturbation are added to the system.  When using a leading-edge computational resource like Firefly, changing run-times from one week to two hours, or running problems 200 times more complex than before, are commonplace.  The computational ability to "see the future" sooner than other researchers leads to substantial competitive advantage – it transforms how problems are posed and resolved.