The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) is the second recipient of the NSF's PACI program. Led by University of California at San Diego (UCSD), NPACI aims to revolutionize the nation's computational infrastructure by building on the foundation of San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and involving 37 of the nation's leading academic and research institutions. Driven by real application needs, NPACI is developing software infrastructure to link the highest performance computers, data servers, and archival storage systems to enable easier use of the aggregate computing power. Development work is focused in specific ``thrust areas'' that join applications scientists, computer scientists, and technology developers and leverage separately funded research projects to ensure rapid deployment and robustness of the resulting infrastructure. This work is complemented by an extensive education, outreach, and training program and collaborations with industry. In developing an integrated computing infrastructure (or metacomputing environment), NPACI will direct its efforts in four technology areas: metasystems, programming tools and environments, data-intensive computing, and interaction environments. The NPACI education and outreach thrust area plans to help society make productive use of computing technologies to understand and solve problems in science, business, government, and society by focusing on five areas: K12 education, undergraduate education, outreach to women and minorities, outreach to communities new to high performance computing, and evaluation of educational programs. NPACI's strategic plan calls for installing a teraflop-scale computer at SDSC within two years and a petabyte (1024 terabyte) archive with distributed caches within five years.