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Montana’s “Big Sky” supercomputer, powered by technology from IBM, Microsoft, NextIO and Nice, is aimed at revitalizing the Rocky Mountain region by attracting business and jobs to the area. Officials with the Rocky Mountain Supercomputer Centers wanted to create an environment where any business can get access to HPC capabilities, regardless of their size.
Montana isn't known for its high-tech constituency, but that's changing with the opening of a supercomputing center, the resources of which are available to all businesses and agencies. eWeek reports:
In 2006, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer told state officials and private companies that he no longer wanted the Rocky Mountain region in the Upper Midwest to be the great American supercomputing desert.
Schweitzer saw high tech as a way of revitalizing the region’s economy, attracting
businesses and creating jobs, and doing so while minimizing the harm to the area’s environment.Three years later, the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center was opened in Butte, Mont. The nonprofit entity was created through the work of both the state government and private corporations like IBM, with the aim of giving anyone of any size—from private businesses to public researchers to government agencies—that needs it access to supercomputing capabilities that they otherwise may not have gotten.
And as they enter 2010, officials with the RMSC are expecting the number of organizations looking to take advantage of this to grow.
“This is the complete democratization of this kind of capability,” Earl Dodd, strategist with IBM’s Deep Computing
business and executive director of the RMSC, said in an interview. “It is available to any kind of business. We don’t expect to replace what everyone else has, just supplement it.”
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