LARRY BRINLEE/WTE Cheyenne LEADS Chief Executive Officer Randy Bruns, left, toasts with LEADS treasurer Barry Sims in Cheyenne on Tuesday to celebrate the city being chosen as the location for a new supercomputing center for the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

rep5@wyomingnews.com

CHEYENNE - When you are racing to the future, you might not be able to imagine the finish line.

But academic and economic development officials in southeast Wyoming said they now know the path they will take to get there, and it will carry the state to a stratospheric level in technological advancement.

The Boulder, Colo.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, widely known as NCAR, and its managing organization, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, announced Tuesday they will build a facility to house one of the most powerful supercomputing centers on the planet at a site a few miles west of Cheyenne.

The $60 million center will boost the research profile of the University of Wyoming and is expected to jumpstart the state's small tech sector, bringing in the kinds of jobs that are considered the gold standard in economic development.

"I think this is just a giant step forward for the University of Wyoming and the state of Wyoming," University of Wyoming President Tom Buchanan said. "This is a facility that will serve as a technological magnet for the state, attracting companies and businesses and individuals that are involved in the highest levels of technological sophistication."

Lining up the pieces

Any visitor to the Capitol late Tuesday morning may have heard applause break out on the floor of the House of Representatives.

While a formal news conference on the announcement is expected to be held later this week, an announcement of sorts surfaced on the House floor.

"I want to try to put this in perspective for you," Rep. Debbie Hammons, D-Worland, said, addressing her colleagues. "This is comparable to the revolution of the invention of the car."

"This will be a technology magnet for the world's best minds in geosciences and energy development," Hammons said. "We cannot even begin to anticipate the impact on our citizens of this world-class facility.

"It is the difference between being a major player in the information age or watching it. This was a competitive process, and we won. Please enjoy with us this moment in history for our state," she said.

A number of details have yet to be worked out - including the funding and final approval from the National Science Foundation, NCAR's major funding source - but the essentials have been hammered out.

Construction is scheduled to begin later this year in the North Range Business Park; it's expected to be up and running by late 2010 or early 2011.

Estimates have ranged from 15 to 60 new jobs created to run the facility.

Once it's operational, the data center will be used by the University of Wyoming, which will have a dedicated portion of computing capacity, as well as a host of other research universities and organizations to advance their work.

For the university and its fledgling School of Energy Resources, the most compelling part of the deal is the collaborations that will result with the center in Boulder, which is a leading research facility in geosciences - generally the study of the earth's non-living environment and everything underground. That's critical for the state's energy-based economy.

While several sites were considered initially, Wyoming economic development and state government officials have known since April that a Wyoming site was on the short list, and they knew they could offer a critical component to sweeten the deal: electricity.

Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power Co. Vice President Rick Kaysen said knowing that, officials from the Cheyenne utility and its parent company, Black Hills Corp., met with NCAR officials to talk about what they needed - reliable, available and affordable electricity.

Black Hills is now building Wygen 2, a 90-megawatt mine-mouth power plant in the Powder River Basin, which is expected to start generating electricity in 2008.

"We will have the capacity coming out of that to deliver power from northeast Wyoming to southeast Wyoming," Kaysen said.

Work on the power plant started in 2005, long before the need for the supercomputing center was publicized, Kaysen said. The plant, considered a generation asset to serve Cheyenne Light customers, was scaled to meet the needs of a growing community.

Cheyenne has another asset that's perhaps not widely known.

Wyoming Business Council Chief Executive Officer Tucker Fagan said the area has access to reliable, redundant fiber-optic pipes that run both north and south and east and west.

The state also had the land. Cheyenne LEADS Chief Executive Officer Randy Bruns said three Wyoming locations were initially considered; the final choice was 24 acres in the North Range Business Park. LEADS, the private economic development corporation for Cheyenne and Laramie County, owns and operates the park.

"They were looking at sites of 12 to 14 acres, for future expansion," Bruns said. "Many of the sites in Colorado were half that size. One of our early strengths was the availability of land."

The learning curve

The University of Wyoming also played a role in negotiations; it's no stranger to the workings of NCAR and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

The university was one of the founding members of UCAR in 1960, Buchanan said.

NCAR officials considered forming partnerships with several universities along the Front Range, and both the University of Colorado in Boulder and the University of Wyoming were looked at closely.

NCAR officials said they chose Wyoming after deciding that a partnership here would allow them to get the greatest possible computing capacity at the earliest possible time.

"We felt fortunate to have such strong interest in this project," center director Tim Killeen said in a prepared statement.

"As a result," he said, "we feel confident that a new Front Range research collaboration anchored by the University of Wyoming and with the University of Colorado at Boulder will emerge that will allow this facility to be truly world-class."

Bill Gern, UW's vice president for research and economic development, termed the move "transformative" for both the university and the state's economic development efforts.

"It will provide exceptional opportunities for NCAR to make positive contributions to the education infrastructure of the entire state," Gern said.

That's a theme that Wyoming Senate President John Schiffer, R-Kaycee, touched on Tuesday.

"This is an offshoot of the legislative efforts to raise the bar in education statewide," Schiffer said.

Lawmakers have made great investments in all levels of education in the state in recent years.

"This is a tremendous opportunity for our students, who will get dedicated access to this computer to end all computers," he said.

How much access has yet to be negotiated, Buchanan said.

"This is one pretty complicated project. We have been negotiating with them for six months," he said. Part of the discussions centered around sharing faculty appointments with the center.

"The opportunity bring this kind of faculty development into Wyoming is just extraordinary," Buchanan said. "We're pretty excited and hopeful we will be able to work through the details and the funding."

Funding is one of the remaining hurdles and it's expected to be dealt with next month, as state lawmakers consider putting together a package that ensures the center's continuation in this year's supplemental state budget.

Wyoming House Speaker Roy Cohee, R-Casper, said the state is contributing $20 million initially - half from the Legislature and half from the university.

"If I had to guess, there will be a lot of faith in the Legislature that this is one we cannot let go by. We have missed a lot of boats," Cohee said.

In talking to UW's School of Energy Resources, he said, the center goes hand in glove with what it's trying to accomplish.

"This means enormous things to UW, in attracting a world-class teaching staff, professors and educators to the university who will be using this thing. That has a way of attracting intelligent students and people who want to be educated by this high quality of educator," Cohee said.

Growing the tech sector

Once the supercomputing center is up and running, it's expected to employ a few dozen people, but those jobs aren't the key benefit.

Shawn Mills, executive director of the Wyoming Technology Organization, said having the supercomputing center in Wyoming will put the state on the map for scientific and technology research and development in a way that's not been possible before.

"We've been overlooked in many instances, and we haven't had the chance to highlight the strengths we have," Mills said. "It's our time in the spotlight to show that the highest-level technological initiatives can take place here."

Having the center in Wyoming will drive a technology cluster that could well pave the way for a research center, much like research clusters that have grown in North Carolina and other places.

The technology sector in Wyoming represents only a tiny fraction of jobs - about 1.8 percent of the state's employment. Even in that small a range, they are valuable jobs, Mills said. On average, technology wages are 32 percent higher than the state's average wage.

"The clustering concept is pretty powerful, so we will see technology projects getting launched," he said.

That may have already started; even before Tuesday's announcement, Bruns at Cheyenne LEADS said he'd already had a call from someone with a high-tech company who had heard about the project in technology circles and was interested in what Cheyenne had to offer.

"We're going to get attention in ways we haven't gotten it before," Bruns said.

"On some levels, this is not the biggest thing in total jobs or total investment that we have ever done," he said. "But the impact to the state and the university will be transformational. No other event has had the potential to be as transformational as this one."