High Tech on the High Plains
by Jay Fromkin
photographs Carlye Calvin © University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
and Ted Brummond
On a cold and sunny January day, Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal strode from his office to a lectern in the Capitol rotunda. Before a group of state legislators and business leaders, he announced a partnership between the University of Wyoming and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
In what UW President Tom Buchanan has called “a transformational project”
for Wyoming and its university, the partnership will bring NCAR’s next
generation of supercomputer to Cheyenne. Just 33 days after his
announcement, Gov. Freudenthal signed legislation appropriating $21 million
toward the project, in effect sealing the deal.
While the speed with which this legislative budget initiative was passed might seem breathtaking, the groundwork was actually laid a decade earlier.
The university created its first academic plan in 1997 to chart UW’s future. The academic plan became the document around which all other planning efforts have revolved. Among the plan’s key elements was a focus on academic distinction in several academic disciplines, including computational science. It’s what UW Vice President for Research and Economic Development Bill Gern calls “the third realm of science,” following theoretical and experimental science. These two disciplines became a major focus for UW at just the right time.
NCAR, a federally funded research facility, has been a cornerstone of Boulder, Colorado’s high-tech community since 1960. Its scientists work on such challenging issues as how the climate system functions, how severe weather occurs, how the sun functions, how planets form and evolve, water quality issues, and how to sustain human society into the future. A more recent NCAR research priority is geosciences, including energy resources.
As NCAR Associate Director Larry Winter has observed, “One of the many attractive things about this collaboration with the University of Wyoming is that we’re not strong in [geosciences], and UW is. This will be an opportunity for us to complement each other.”
Among
NCAR’s five existing centers is the Computer and Information Systems Lab (CISL),
an array of rack-mounted IBM computers that, operating together as a
supercomputer called Blueice, can perform 12 trillion floating-point
operations (the location of the decimal point in a calculation) per second.
As astounding as that may seem, in 2010 Blueice will be obsolete.
About two years ago NCAR found itself planning a replacement supercomputer, just as it had every previous three to four years. The process is a bit more complicated than buying a laptop from an electronics store. For one thing, supercomputers are energy hogs. They require enormous amounts of energy to operate and to counter the heat they produce while running. Since supercomputers exist both in physical space and in cyberspace, they require both land for construction and proximity to high-speed data connections. They also need the talents of people who can make effective use of the awesome computing power.
Where could NCAR secure enough reasonably priced energy, in a location close to high-speed Internet lines, within the geography of a research university that has made computational and earth systems science a priority? A remarkable partnership of several Wyoming organizations provided the answer to that question. Cheyenne’s economic development agency, LEADS, offered land in its Interstate 80 business park. Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power pledged a reliable and reasonably priced fossil-fuel and renewable power supply. The Wyoming Business Council promised funds for site preparation. The University of Wyoming, which for years had worked with NCAR on atmospheric science projects, was a powerful source of intellectual horsepower and faculty exchange opportunities for NCAR staff. During a 17-month period these diverse partners developed a proposal that the state of Colorado and its universities could not match. And, with the support of Gov. Freudenthal and the Wyoming State Legislature, the deal was sealed. Pending legislative appropriations, NCAR was coming to Wyoming.
In early February, UW officials, representatives of NCAR, and the director of the business council held a briefing for Wyoming legislators, outlining the scope of the supercomputer project, the organizational relationship between UW and NCAR, and the benefits that would accrue to the various partners. Not surprisingly, one focus of the discussion was money.
This
is a big project. According to NCAR Director Tim Killeen, the Cheyenne
supercomputer will be two to five times as powerful as the Blueice computer,
occupying 20,000 square feet of computer space. It will, at least in the
short term, be the largest, most powerful computer on Earth. It will use as
much electricity as a city with 4,000 to 6,000 homes. It will perform a
million billion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. UW
President Tom Buchanan provided another way to express the computing power
of son-of-Blueice during the legislative briefing: “In your head, multiply
0.00372 x 648. That’s one calculation. We have about 5 billion people on the
Earth. If everyone on the Earth were doing 200,000 of those calculations
every second—that’s the speed of the computer.”
And that’s just the anticipated computing speed when the facility opens in 2010. As UW Vice President for Academic Affairs Myron Allen reminded legislators, every generation of supercomputer is roughly 10 to 15 times more powerful than its predecessor. NCAR, while noting that its current facility has been in Boulder for 46 years, is committed to a minimum 20-year life span for the Cheyenne facility. If NCAR swaps out its computers every three to four years, the computing power available to UW by the end of that period will be unfathomable.
The cost of the project is as colossal as the project itself. During NCAR’s 20-year commitment, the full tab will be nearly $532 million, including $248 million for recurring replacement of the computers. Of that total, the state of Wyoming (through legislative appropriations for construction and data center operations, land conveyance, and site preparation) will pay only a fraction of that: $47.4 million (including the $21 million appropriated by the 2007 Legislature), or 9 percent of the project costs. The remainder will come from NCAR, largely through its main sponsor, the National Science Foundation.
For its 9 percent investment, the state of Wyoming, through research conducted by the University of Wyoming/NCAR partnership, will be guaranteed at least 20 percent of the computer’s operating time, or cycles. That’s more than double the return on investment. And as the computing power of the facility grows over time, so will UW’s research capacity.
The
supercomputer also will magnify the impact of other investments in UW made
by the state and corporate Wyoming. Consider energy. In 2006, the Wyoming
Legislature appropriated $12 million toward creating a UW School of Energy
Resources. That investment spurred $12 million in additional investments by
EnCana Oil & Gas USA, Shell Exploration & Production Company, and the
Nielson Family Trust of Cody, Wyoming.
Carol Frost, interim director of the School of Energy Resources, sees the energy connection. She says that the power of the supercomputer will help the school model mineral formations and analyze how easily fluids—such as oil, gas, and water—flow through the reservoir rock that holds them. That sort of analysis is a key to the future of Wyoming energy production.
While energy research will have a major role in using the NCAR supercomputer, it is not UW’s only computational science discipline. Since adoption of its second academic plan, UW has been building its computational science strengths in atmospheric science, botany, chemical and petroleum engineering, chemistry, computer science, geology and geophysics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, molecular biology, and statistics. As part of its proposal to NCAR, UW provided a partial list of 32 research faculty members with expertise involving computational science who could participate in the partnership.
The supercomputer will not only help retain existing faculty members but also attract the next generation of research superstars. As Gern notes, “There are very few American universities right now that have the capability to become associated with a large supercomputer. We think the University of Wyoming will become one of the nation’s leaders in computational science because of the people we’ll be able to attract to this institution, and because of our work in partnership with NCAR.”
It’s not just UW research faculty who will get to use the supercomputer. Commercial businesses will be able to take advantage of its computing power through contracts with UW faculty and NCAR. And, according to Buchanan, UW students, including undergraduates, will directly benefit from what he calls “big science.”
Bryan Shader, the chairman of UW’s math department, agrees. “This is going to change the way we teach courses. We have to train students to think on the more global scale, not just to solve little, tiny problems, but to solve highly related problems. We’re going to have to train them to be able to work with this powerful tool. They’re actually going to be integral parts of the next major breakthroughs in science.”
The supercomputer also will be an integral part of preparing Wyoming for its future as a diversified economy with a significant high-tech component. Building the supercomputer in Cheyenne has been compared with the early days of California’s Silicon Valley. To borrow from the movie Field of Dreams, if you build it (the supercomputer) they (high tech industries) will come. According to Wyoming Business Council CEO Tucker Fagan, the supercomputer will add a knowledge-based enterprise to the state’s economy and help to attract other knowledge-based industries and employees to the state. Fagan told legislators that within a week of the governor’s announcement, two companies contacted Cheyenne LEADS, saying, “If NCAR is looking at Wyoming, we want to look at Wyoming also.”
So who benefits from this partnership? Everyone.
Tim
Killeen told attendees at the governor’s news conference, “We like to think
that this is a world-class effort, and we like to think that this is a
world-class partnership that we’re initiating with the University of Wyoming
and the state of Wyoming.”
Speaker of the House Roy Cohee said, “It is not often that we get an opportunity like this in the state of Wyoming. This is a home run and the World Series and the Super Bowl times 1,000 all rolled into one.”
But the last words go to Buchanan. At the governor’s news conference, he said, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this supercomputer and our partnership with NCAR will allow UW to become one of the nation’s centers for computational sciences. It will open up new frontiers for all of us.”
Summing up the legislative briefing, Buchanan said, “This is an
opportunity extended to us by NCAR to join the big leagues, to stay there
and to play there. We’re
being given the opportunity to step behind the wheel of the Starship
Enterprise and boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Scotty, come 2010 you’re going to have plenty of power.
