The announcement comes two months after the Trump administration announced plans to shut down NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
The Derecho supercomputer, located at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in the North Range Business Park in west Cheyenne, has been facing an uncertain future as a result.
NCAR-Wyoming was opened in 2012. It is operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) NCAR Computational & Information Systems Lab (CISL) in support of advanced geosciences associated with world-class computing, data management and research in computational science, according to the NCAR-Wyoming website.
NCAR-Wyoming also feeds data into the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which allows the two federal agencies to use its climate model to predict future storm severity and fight climate change.
The computing system inside the facility has been updated twice since its first model, named Yellowstone, became operational in 2012. Its use continued until 2017. The second model, named Cheyenne, was active until 2023, and the current model, Derecho, has been active for the past two years.
Michael England, NSF head of media affairs, told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle via email Thursday that NSF has offered UW the opportunity to submit a proposal for operations of the supercomputer.
According to its website, CISL provides computing resources, services and support to more than 500 universities and research institutions, one of which is UW.
UW and NCAR-Wyoming have an alliance that allocates 320 million core hours of the Derecho system time to UW students and staff for research of Wyoming-led projects focused on NSF-supported sciences, such as geosciences, and other scientific areas of interest to Wyoming.
Chad Baldwin, UW associate vice president of institutional communications, told the WTE Thursday that the university is aware of the offer and is looking to proceed with it. Rather than answer questions on the phone call, Baldwin sent a statement to WTE on the university’s behalf.
“The supercomputing center and the Derecho NSF-supported computing facility within are great assets for the university and state, and UW is a heavy user of the computer,” the statement reads. “We are closely following the process laid out by the NSF for next steps, and have conveyed our interest in playing an appropriate role to support it in the future.”
England said he could not disclose what other agencies were offered the opportunity to submit a proposal for operations.
At the time of publication, calls by the WTE to NCAR’s Boulder facility and NCAR-Wyoming had not been returned.
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