CHEYENNE, Wyo.—A $70 million building that will house one of the world’s fastest supercomputers dedicated to earth sciences is just about finished in a business park outside Cheyenne.
Gov. Matt Mead got a look inside Friday and said that while the project has yet to draw high-tech businesses to the high plains site, it’s only a matter of time.
“If they’ve done their homework, they know it’s coming,” he said. “There is synergy that’s going to be developed as a result of having this here.”
The Boulder, Colo.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research is looking to the supercomputer to vastly expand scientists’ ability to study a range of topics including weather, climate, oceanography and air pollution.
The new computer will exceed a petaflop, or 1 quadrillion calculations per second, a speed achieved by only a handful of computers worldwide to date.
Scientists won’t have to travel to Cheyenne to take advantage of the technology but will be able to use the computer from just about anywhere.
NCAR has begun shopping around for a company to supply the powerful machine. It plans to announce the winner of the confidential process this fall and receive the computer in early 2012.
So far the project is on track for scientists to begin using the supercomputer by next summer, after it’s tested out, according to NCAR.
The computer will cost between $25 million and $35 million and make use of the cool and dry climate in Cheyenne to save energy. NCAR boasts that despite being 20 times more powerful than the current NCAR supercomputer in Boulder, the new computer will consume only three times as much energy, which means it will be four times as efficient.
The facility also has been built with plenty of room to expand and with enough flexibility to accommodate yet-to-be developed computers and technology, pointed out Rick Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages NCAR.
“The buzzword is ‘future proof.’ I wish I could future-proof myself,” Anthes quipped. “I’ll settle for this, I guess.”
Trying to predict how climate change will affect the planet is a big part of NCAR’s mission and will be among the supercomputer’s major tasks.
Global climate trends are simpler to predict than what will happen regionally. Scientists say the supercomputer will enable them to develop regional temperature and precipitation models at higher resolution than what is currently possible.
