CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Business Report By Steve Clark Forget the mysteries of the universe; how's this thing going to make us rich? It's true that the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, a "high-speed, advanced data" fiber-optic network linking the state's major research centers and LSU's SuperMike supercomputer, will put massive IT power at the disposal of researchers in pure science-like astrophysicists peering into black holes. That's important. Yet LONI is also being billed as a way to boost Louisiana's economy-to "diversify our state's economic base and at the same time strengthen our traditional industries," according to Dan Henderson, who heads the state economic development department's IT cluster. But John Stevenson, a veteran of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois who's been working with the state Board of Regents on LONI, warns that economic development through technology depends not on the size of the tool, but rather on how it's used. LONI isn't cheap: its first phase, officially called the Louisiana Area Research Network, will cost an estimated $27.3 million. Gov. Kathleen Blanco last month pledged $40 million to develop the network as well as something called LAGrid, the means by which each of LONI's eight campuses will be able to tie together all their high-tech resources. This "grid" essentially will transform Louisiana into one vast computational organism. The fact that the network will also be connected to the LambdaRail, a national fiber-optic mega-network, means Louisiana's grid could be used to coordinate with supercomputers all over the country to work on a particular problem. The regents last June committed $5 million over five years to get Baton Rouge into the LambdaRail club, a privately led consortium of 25 cities across the country. Baton Rouge is the only "node" between Pensacola and Houston. Let's see: $40 million here, $5 million there-pretty soon you're talking real money. Plenty of people, however, are anticipating a real return. One of them is Roland Toups, chairman of the state Board of Regents, which oversees LONI. "I'm sold," says Toups, who's also chairman/CEO of Turner Industries. "The payoff will be for my kids and my grandkids. This is not a quick fix thing. In Louisiana we're always looking for a quick fix. This is something for the long haul." He wasn't always sold. Toups says that when Ed Seidel, a renowned astrophysicist and director of LSU's Center for Computing Technology, told the regents a couple of years ago that LambdaRail, along with the future of supercomputing, was about to bypass the state, the board wanted to know what was in it for Louisiana besides being able to do really cool science. "The question we asked at regents is show us the bottom-line ROI. Where is it on this thing? And we want some real quantifiable results. What's the economic opportunity out there?" Toups says studying black holes and the like is part of the academic mission and necessary to add to the body of science. At the same time, he wants to see practical applications "that can give us some jobs in this state and create opportunities." Stevenson says those opportunities are real. He should know, since he designed and still manages the NCSA's industrial program, which has forged partnerships with over 20 major corporations-Boeing, Motorola and Caterpillar among them-since it was founded in 1986 at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Today the campus houses the most powerful supercomputers in the world. It has a building almost a city block square that's jammed with them. When Stevenson approached his first client, Eastman Kodak, about a partnership, the company's executives couldn't think of a problem big enough to require the services of all that capacity. Kodak thought harder and eventually signed up-for $3 million, back when supercomputing cost $1,000 an hour, though it's much cheaper now-and watched itself become more competitive thanks to the partnership. "This is something I always say to industry: Think of problems that you've never been able to solve before, problems that are big and long term," Stevenson says. Louisiana companies, too, need to be aware of the magnitude of the technology they'll soon have access to, Stevenson says. His job in the early days was pitching supercomputing to executives, then teaching them how to use it to their competitive advantage. The critical next step for Louisiana, Stevenson says, is to get the word out to businesses that they can use LONI's technology to make themselves more competitive. Ideally, that will help the state's economy. The NSCA doesn't consider its mandate to be economic development, he says, but when corporate partnerships work, "it's going to have an effect on the economy." An example in Illinois: Caterpillar was so taken with the visualization technology it was using at the NSCA to redesign operator controls for its heavy equipment that the company built its own visualization facility at its Peoria headquarters, which created new high-paying jobs. Forging such bonds between industry and academia through LONI will require creating an office with a mandate to market the network technology to industry and make it painless to access, Stevenson says. "You're dealing with two cultures: business and academic culture," Stevenson says. "The mindsets are different, but it can be done. You have to have something formal so they can take advantage of it. You've got to get out there and tell the world that you've got it now, that we're one of the best and we're as good as any place else on the planet."