 The CTC was established in 1985 under the direction of Cornell Physics Professor and Nobel Laureate Kenneth G. Wilson.In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the CTC, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States.In 1985, a team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications began the development of NSFNet, a TCP/IP-based computer network that could connect to the ARPANET at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.