The Gigascale Silicon Research Center (GSRC) was established in December, 1998 to perform long-range, collaborative research that address the challenges of chip design and test that we expect to be facing in the 8-12 year timeframe. At present, the GSRC involves twenty five faculty and nine US universities, along with more than 50 post-doctoral researchers and graduate students. In this paper we present the overall goals and organization of the GSRC, along with the research thrusts and themes the Center is pursuing. While it is still a very young research effort, we have already changed our overall emphasis in a number of ways, based on our early results and analysis. A number of these interim conclusions are presented, along with the approaches we are taking to address these long-range research challenges.