It's more a matter of what have they done for us lately. We had a number of supercomputing centers in the 90's (at least one has shuttered), and among other things NCSA brought most people their first telnet client and their first web browser via NSF funding that Al Gore pushed for (see also: Al Gore invented the Internet)

After that they were working with INRIA on collaboration software fifteen years before WebEx was a thing. They also had large divisions looking at VR and data visualization.