Economy & Economic Development  February 2, 2007

Wyoming wins NCAR supercomputer

BOULDER – It came down to money and politics.

While Boulder may have been the more logical place to house a new $60 million supercomputer for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Wyoming was less expensive.

“There were a lot of pros and cons at each site, but the No. 1 factor in my mind was money,´ said Rick Anthes, president of the University Corp. for Atmospheric Research, which manages Boulder-based NCAR.

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“Wyoming offered more money, cheaper construction costs and cheaper land,” Anthes said. “Those factors meant we will have more money to purchase computing power, and that’s our No. 1 goal. We estimate that we can buy twice as much computing power in Wyoming over Colorado.”

Wyoming offered NCAR $20 million in state funds – $10 million of which are from the University of Wyoming endowment fund – and an additional $1 million a year for 20 years. That’s a total of $40 million.

Cheyenne LEADS, an economic development group for Cheyenne and Laramie County, offered 26.2 acres in its North Range Business Park, west of the city. Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power Co. already had the proper connections in place, while the University of Colorado would have needed an additional $5 million to get electricity to its proposed site.

In its bid, CU offered $5 million in cash toward construction of the facility, $5 million toward building maintenance, $540,000 per year for land rent for the life of the project, $200,000 toward administrative and overhead charges, $1 million a year for the first 10 years for computer rental costs, a $2.5 million contribution toward five shared CU/NCAR faculty positions, and an extra $1 million in cash from the university’s president’s office. CU also was asking state legislators for $5 million to pay for the electrical connection.

Over the same 20 years as Wyoming’s offer, that’s a total of $25.5 million.

Share the wealth

Politics comes into play because a large chunk of the money will come from the National Science Foundation – the federal agency that financially supports science nationwide. Since Colorado already has numerous federal labs, NSF may want to share some of the wealth with Wyoming.

Federal officials have designated Wyoming an EPSCoR state, which gives it an opportunity to access more funds through the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research program, said Clifford Jacobs, head of the UCAR and Lower Atmospheric Facilities Oversight Section.

EPSCoR helps fund sustainable research and development infrastructure to increase the ability for disadvantaged states to compete for federal and private-sector research and development funding.

The possible EPSCoR dollars, plus other federal assistance programs, gave Wyoming an extra $10 million to $15 million that Colorado couldn’t access, said Richard Porreca, senior vice chancellor and chief financial officer at CU.

“This is exactly the type of economic development that will allow Wyoming to build our intellectual capital and become a world-class player in the high-tech arena,” Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal said in a statement posted on the governor’s Web site. “Wyoming will become a magnet for researchers, professors, students and entrepreneurs who rely on and can benefit from access to one of the world’s most powerful computers.”

Construction is scheduled to begin this year pending funding approvals from the Wyoming Legislature and the NSF. The center will open in late 2010 or early 2011.

The proposed supercomputers will initially increase processing speeds from 15 teraflops (at the existing Mesa Lab in Boulder) to hundreds of teraflops, which is equal to trillions of computations per second. Eventually speeds will reach 1 petaflop, or one quadrillion computations per second.

Wyoming’s gain, Colorado’s loss

Anthes estimates 20 to 30 jobs at the existing NCAR supercomputer center in Boulder will be moved to Cheyenne by 2011. A total of 40 people will work at the new facility. For now, NCAR will keep the rest of its headquarters in Boulder, and the idea of secondary, smaller supercomputer centers linked to the central one in Wyoming is still alive, officials said.

The cluster of networked supercomputers across the country would be modeled after the National Science Foundation’s Tera-Grid partnership, which already links scientific computers across the country.

Such an idea could keep many experts in Boulder, said Susan Avery, dean of CU’s graduate school and vice chancellor for research.

“There’s a lot of intellectual capital here,” Avery said. “We’ll continue to work with the supercomputer center through a partnership with the University of Wyoming and other universities in Colorado.”

In Wyoming, officials expect CU to be an integral partner in the regional project.

“This really is a regional partnership, and from a larger point of view, all of the schools in the region gained,” Cheyenne LEADS president Randy Bruns, said.

In the end, the physical location of the supercomputer may not be that big a deal, said Richard Johnson, head of the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Johnson said that professors, researchers and students at CSU use the existing supercomputer in Boulder to run applications that require a lot of computing power. With the future supercomputer going to Wyoming, little change is expected.  

“I guess it could be in Timbuktu, as long as it provides the same service,” Johnson said.

Gravitational pull shifts

But in the long run, Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. Executive Vice President Tom Clark believes Colorado will lose out on more jobs,  as science-related companies and labs move to relocate themselves around the new supercomputer center in Wyoming.

“In my business, it’s called gravitational pull,” Clark said. “And there’s a big center of gravity up there now.”

Clark said he is distressed by Colorado’s ability to financially compete for the federal labs.

“We in Colorado have owned the world of atmospheric research for 50 years and to lose an opportunity like this is troubling,” he said. “It really shows how our state works under a strapped budget. We’re not capable of responding to the financial incentives of other states.”

Clark added that there needs to be “a long-term stream of money for economic development” in order for Colorado to compete.

Contact David Clucas at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail dclucas@bcbr.com.

BOULDER – It came down to money and politics.

While Boulder may have been the more logical place to house a new $60 million supercomputer for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Wyoming was less expensive.

“There were a lot of pros and cons at each site, but the No. 1 factor in my mind was money,´ said Rick Anthes, president of the University Corp. for Atmospheric Research, which manages Boulder-based NCAR.

“Wyoming offered more money, cheaper construction costs and cheaper land,” Anthes said. “Those factors meant we will have more money to purchase computing power, and that’s our No. 1 goal.…

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