Labs. In Bill Gates' 2004 talk as part of his five-university campus tour titled "Software Breakthroughs: Solving the Toughest Problems in Computer Science," he mentioned that Microsoft hired more graduates from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign than from any other university in the world.
=== Centers and institutes ===
The university hosts the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which created Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, the Apache HTTP server, and NCSA Telnet. The Parallel@Illinois program hosts several programs in parallel computing, including the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center. The university contracted with Cray to build the National Science Foundation-funded supercomputer Blue Waters. The system also has the largest public online storage system in the world with more than 25 petabytes of usable space. The university celebrated January 12, 1997, as the "birthday" of HAL 9000, the fictional supercomputer from the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey; …
