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GOVERNOR
BLAGOJEVICH PRAISES ARGONNE PARTNERSHIP WITH OAK RIDGE
NATIONAL LABORATORY AND PRIVATE SECTOR TO DEVELOP
STATE-OF-THE-ART SUPERCOMPUTER
SPRINGFIELD – Governor Rod
Blagojevich praised today’s announcement that the U.S.
Department of Energy has awarded $25 million in funding
to a project involving Argonne National Laboratory,
located just outside Chicago, for the construction of a
50 teraflop (50 trillion calculations per second)
science research supercomputer. Cray Corporation, IBM
Corporation and Silicon Graphics, Inc. are development
partners in this supercomputer that will be open to the
scientific community for research. In addition to this
recent award, the President’s Fiscal Year 2005 request
for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science
includes an additional $25 million for such a
capability. Supporting the Argonne National Laboratory
will be a key component of Governor Blagojevich’s
Opportunity Returns initiative for the Northeast region
– his soon-to-be-unveiled regional economic development
plan designed to create jobs and spur economic growth in
the region and throughout the state.
“This project helps to illustrate the importance of the
federal government and its national laboratories, state
government and the private sector collaborating to
advance important scientific discovery,” said Governor
Blagojevich. “I want to congratulate Dr. Hermann Grunder,
Director of Argonne National Laboratory, and all of the
hardworking, dedicated scientists, engineers and
researchers at the laboratory for their role in this
critical project. Illinois has a long history of
innovation, and this is just one more example of the
talent that makes this innovation possible.”
The supercomputer will be located in a National
Leadership Computing Facility to be constructed at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
As part of this effort, Argonne National Laboratory
expects to install a 5-teraflop IBM BlueGene computer.
The BlueGene architecture is a core component of the
project’s hardware path, both to engage the widest
possible range of applications and to explore promising
technologies for next generation leadership-class
machines. Argonne will lead the BlueGene deployment and
evaluation activities. This will provide a new tool for
researchers to have to access to a high speed
computational network that should help accelerate their
research, which could then lead to an unprecedented
level of commercialization creating new companies and
jobs in Illinois.
“This is another tremendous example of why Illinois
continues to produce the cutting edge technologies that
are making an enormous impact throughout the scientific
community and the industrial sector. Argonne continues
to be a pioneer, and the Governor is thrilled to be able
to partner with this laboratory today because the
research that is produced here has and will continue to
changes lives for the better,” Illinois Department of
Commerce and Economic Opportunity Director Jack Lavin
said.
Through Opportunity Returns,
Governor Blagojevich will continue to fund several
crucial Argonne projects. He has already committed $34
million for the construction of the Center for Nanoscale
Materials and $13 million for the construction of the
Rare Isotope Accelerator Science Center.
Argonne National Laboratory is the nation’s first
national laboratory, chartered in 1946. Today, Argonne
has more than 4,000 employees and an annual operating
budget of nearly a half billion dollars. Its research
falls into four broad categories – basic science,
scientific facilities (including the Advanced Photon
Source, Intense Pulse Neutron Source and Tandem Linear
Accelerator System), energy resources and environmental
management.
The Opportunity Returns regional economic development
plan is the most aggressive, comprehensive approach to
creating jobs in Illinois’ history. Since a
one-size-fits-all approach to economic development just
doesn’t work, the Governor has divided the state into 10
regions – finding areas with common economic strengths
and needs, and developing a plan with specific actions
for each region. Each plan is tailored to deliver real
results that local businesses will see, feel, and,
hopefully, profit from. The Governor has already
unveiled plans for six of the ten regions – Northern
Stateline, Northwest, Southern, North Central, Southwest
and West Central regions. He will announce the plans for
the East Central, Southeast, Central and Northeast
regions in the coming months. |
