On Order: $11 Million Supercomputer; N.M. communities, businesses and schools will use system

New Mexico is about to enter the era of tera.

For a cool $11 million, the state will soon get a supercomputer that will provide serious number-crunching capability to high-tech businesses, schools and communities.

It will, for a short time at least, be among the top five most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The system will be capable of 172 trillion calculations per second - 172 teraflops in computer-speak. About 30,000 times more powerful than a common personal laptop, it will be the centerpiece of the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

Officials say the new center could help clients engineer new products, model environmental patterns or solve problems like energy shortfalls.

"This will be the largest nonfederally funded, high-performance computing platform in the nation," said Stephen Wheat, director of High Performance Computing for Intel Corp., which will house the state's system in vacant space at its Rio Rancho plant.

In-state businesses, schools or communities will not be charged to send problems or projects to the center. Out-ofstate users will be charged, said Tom Bowles, a former chief science officer at Los Alamos National Laboratory who is on loan as a science adviser to Richardson. State officials will seek agreements with those entities to move some of their work here, Bowles said.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based computer firm SGI has an $11 million contract to build and install the supercomputer, expected to be operational by next summer. Using existing high-speed data connections, like LambdaRail, it will connect to local communities through "gateways" at local colleges.

It will be managed by the state's Department of Information Technology and have its own staff, which will interact with users from science, business and educational realms.

"Our supercomputing center will be a world-class research facility," Gov. Bill Richardson said in a news release. "We will recruit companies to partner with us and move their research, development and manufacturing operations to the state, creating more highwage jobs for New Mexicans."

When complete, the SGI Altix ICE system will be powered by about 3,500 quad-core Intel Xeon chips, and have 28 terabytes of memory - equivalent to about 28,000 typical desktop computers.

SGI CEO Bo Ewald, in a statement, said the supercomputer would make the state "a region of unbridled innovation and opportunity."

Bowles, who helped spearhead the project, said businesses are using computer modeling to get products to market earlier.

"With the power of supercomputing, they can model and test on a computer in a short time what would have taken months or years to build and test in real life," he said.

The government has used supercomputers since the 1960s to test the effects of simulated nuclear bomb blasts and other research, and New Mexico's federal labs have played host over the years to some of the world's most powerful computers.

Bowles said the state decided to get its own supercomputer because impending federal budget cuts could end some of those government programs.

"This provides a means to retain these talented people as they're pushed out of federal programs," he said.

Furthermore, unlike federally funded supercomputers at labs, a state-owned system will be open to anyone.

The cost is covered by $14 million in capital outlay passed during the 2007 Legislature. Of that money, $11 million went to SGI, which will work with Intel to install the system, beginning next month. The rest will be used to begin designs for a planned central office for the project and to buy equipment for the gateways on college campuses.

Temporary staff is on loan from the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, New Mexico State University, and Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Bowles said backers plan to ask the Legislature for $11 million more in 2008 to fund the creation of a permanent office, build more college gateways, and hire staff. Though Intel will house the roughly 600-square-foot computer, the center's office will

be at an as-yet undecided location and will access the computer remotely.

The group expects to seek a total of $42 million in state funding before the project is sustained by member companies and government agencies and royalties from intellectual property developed at the center.

Intel's Wheat, who was the architect for the recently decommissioned ASCII Red supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, said such a machine would have a useful life of about eight years.

N.M.'s own supercomputer

WHAT: A state-funded $11 million supercomputer that can assist businesses, schools and others.

WHEN: Fully operational by summer.

INITIAL COST: $11 million for computer plus $3 million for staff and "gateways."

TOTAL COST: $42 million for staff, offices, etc., before the program is expected to support itself.