New Mexico's supercomputer gamble draws questions

12.06.2009
Believing a supercomputer would help create jobs, New Mexico paid for and built a massive supercomputer named Encanto to spur economic development.

In the fall of 2007, at its birth, New Mexico's supercomputer was ranked No. 3 in the world. It's now ranked No. 12 and when the latest Top500 ranking comes this month, it may fall some more.

As with most supercomputers, fame is fleeting, and so now is patience of the government that funded Encanto.

A state Legislative Finance Committee report released last month was skeptical about the $36 million project's future. The report pointedly said the group that runs the project was a worry. "[New Mexico Computing Application Center's] ability to continue as a going concern is in question."

It's too early to know if New Mexico's experiment will spur high-tech economic growth, which is the ultimate goal of the system. But when New Mexico decided on this approach, it aimed big. Encanto has 14,500 Intel Xeon processors running on a Silicon Graphics Inc. system.

SGI was recently sold at a fire sale price of $25 million to Rackable Systems Inc., another source of legislative ire. But what hasn't changed is center's access to the engineering talent at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, as well as several universities.