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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 11, 2005
Groundbreaking for the CSRI was held at Sandia Science and Technology Park, located adjacent to Sandia Labs. The building is scheduled to be completed in early 2006. (Photo by Bill Doty)ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A groundbreaking ceremony was held Aug. 9 for Sandia National Laboratories' Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI), being built "outside the fence" to enable university researchers and students to more easily work alongside Sandia researchers on large-scale computational problems that are critical to Sandia's mission and U.S. technological leadership.
CSRI will be built in the Sandia Science and Technology Park, a 200-acre master-planned technology community located adjacent to Sandia and Kirtland Air Force Base. Once completed in early 2006, the $6 million, 34,500-square-foot building will accommodate up to 135 Sandia researchers and 55 collaborators. Researchers there will have access to Sandia's computing resources, such the Cray "Red Storm" supercomputer and the Dell "Thunderbird" supercomputer cluster.
One CSRI focus is modeling and simulation, which is key to much of Sandia's work, including weapons, homeland security, and microsystems. For example, CSRI hosts visitors collaborating on water security research in which Sandia scientists develop and use computer models toward preventing or mitigating the impact of attacks on the nation's water distribution systems.
Sandia Labs President and Director Tom Hunter said the CSRI is an important piece of the country's future role in the global technological marketplace. Technological leadership will require not just faster computers but figuring out how to "harness the power of computing" and rethinking how creative ideas are translated into practical technologies for the marketplace.
"Modeling and simulation is expanding your mind and allowing your mind to do things you can't do any other way. It's not about just computing faster because we're doing that…It's really about computing smarter, and that's what CSRI is about," Hunter said. "It's about figuring out how to figure out better. It's about thinking through what a computer can do and doing it in a very efficient way, clever way with fundamental mathematics."
Facilities such as the Computer Science Research Institute will play an important role in U.S. technological competitiveness, said U.S. Senator Pete Domenici. At left is Ed Adams, City of Albuquerque chief operating officer. (Photo by Bill Doty)Established in 2000, CSRI sponsors studies in computer science, computational science, and mathematics that impact large-scale modeling and simulation. Of special interest is scaling-the development of ways of using computers to solve problems effectively both as the problem scales up in size and complexity, and as the number of computer processors used to solve it scales up to thousands or even tens of thousands of processors. CSRI is currently located on Kirtland Air Force Base at Sandia, making it more difficult for university researchers and students to collaborate with Sandia scientists. Locating it in Sandia Science and Technology Park-"outside the fence"-will alleviate that difficulty.
CSRI offers internships to university faculty and undergraduate students in their junior year through the Ph.D. level. Students are encouraged to pursue careers in computer science, computational science, and mathematics that support directly the challenges of national security. The CSRI also hosts short- and long-term visits by collaborators and topical workshops addressing challenging problems in computer science.
While computational science is often taken for granted, it's a "core enterprise" for our nation's economic competitiveness, scientific leadership, and national security, where it replaces nuclear testing, said Dimitri Kusnezov, director of the Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. "CSRI really encompasses all of this, from developing advanced architectures, novel ideas, new types of more efficient computers, to the methodologies and tools you need to make effective use of these gigantic pieces of equipment." Because computational science is an increasingly international effort, he said that "breaking it outside the fence" is a "wonderful step forward."
U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman said the CSRI will play a role in attracting top researchers to Sandia to work on long-term fundamental problems. "This CSRI is going to facilitate bringing those very best people to Sandia for a long time to come," he said.
U.S. Senator Pete Domenici echoed Hunter's description of the role and importance of the CSRI to U.S. technological competitiveness. "We've had the safety of an overload of developed brains," said Domenici, "but this isn't going to last." The CSRI, he said, "is what we're doing to keep up with the world."
The CSRI building will be constructed and then leased back to Sandia by Albuquerque-based real estate development company Avalon Investments, Inc. It will include space especially designed and furnished to facilitate collaborative interactions. This includes high-bandwidth connections and visualization capabilities, enhanced telecommunications and video conferencing equipment, electronic whiteboards, and projection capabilities.
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
Sandia media contact: Neal Singer , nsinger@sandia.gov, (505) 845-7078
