This article is about the main campus. For other uses and locations of University of Illinois, see University of Illinois (disambiguation)
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I or simply Illinois), is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious campus in the University of Illinois system. It is one of America's most highly selective state schools with several of its popular undergraduateresources/usnews_undergrad_historical_rankings.htm" target="_blank">http://www.publicaffairs.uiuc.edu/survey_resources/usnews_undergrad_historical_rankings.htm and graduatehttp://www.publicaffairs.uiuc.edu/survey_resources/usnews_grad_historical_rankings.htm programs ranked first in the nation.
The university is composed of 18 Colleges and Institutes that offer more than 150 programs of study. In addition, the university operates an extension that serves 2.5 million registrants per year around the state of Illinois and beyond. The campus includes 272 major buildings on 1,458 acres (5.90 km²) in the _twin cities of Champaign and Urbana, and has an annual budget of nearly $1.4 billion. As of 30 June 2007, the University of Illinois Foundation - a systemwide endowment - totals at $2.197 billion.
As of Summer 2007, 42,728 students from all 50 states and more than 100 nations were enrolled; 31,472 were undergraduate students and 11,256 were graduate students. Until 1998, Illinois was one of the 10 largest universities in the United States in terms of student enrollment .
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been consistently ranked as one of the top 10 public universities in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. It is also included on the list of top state schools designated as a "Public Ivy." The university is comprehensively measured as one of the Top 20, public and private, major-research universities in America by Graham-Diamond ReportDiamond.html" target="_blank">http://www.physics.northwestern.edu/graduate/Graham_Diamond.html.
The university is home to the _National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which is an international leader in deploying high-performance computing resources, and is currently partnering with IBM and the National Science Foundation to build the world's fastest supercomputer. This supercomputer, named "Blue Waters," will be capable of performing one quadrillion calculations per second. This will make Blue Waters three times faster than today's fastest supercomputer.
Eleven alumni and nine professors (two of whom are also alumni) from U of I have won the Nobel Prize. . Alumni and faculty have created numerous products and companies including Mosaic and Netscape Communications, Advanced Micro Devices, PayPal, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Playboy Enterprises, the National Football League, Siebel Systems, YouTube, Oracle Corporation, Lotus Software, Black Entertainment Television, the transistor, the integrated circuit, the light-emitting diode, magnetic resonance imaging, Mozilla Firefox, and the plasma screen display.
