To those on either coast, it may seem an anomaly that the world`s leading supercomputer mecca rises out of the cornfields of central Illinois.
But transforming the University of Illinois campus into the Supercomputer Capital of the world was not such a great leap for the high-technology gurus who have kept the university`s engineering school on technology`s cutting edge for years.
Turning that rural college town into another Silicon Valley or Mass. Hwy. 128, however, remains in many ways a much greater challenge–and a definite goal on the minds of state and university officials.
Admittedly, Urbana lacks most of the amenities of the San Francisco Bay or Boston areas, but proponents of the concept hope such mundane issues no longer matter. They point to what the Downstate area does have going for it:
The high-tech history being made here daily, four hours south of Chicago.
Probably the area`s biggest lures are David Kuck (pronounced Cook) and Larry Smarr, among the world`s brightest luminaries in supercomputing, not to mention the supercomputer: A Cray X-MP-24, soon to be replaced by a Cray X-MP- 48.
The U. of I. became one of four universities to get a supercomputer as part of a $44 million National Science Foundation grant made in 1985. The Cray X-MP-24 has two central processing units, with 4 million words of memory. It can do up to 100 million calculations a second. The X-MP-48 has four processors and 8 million words of memory.
The U. of I. also has two supercomputer centers: Kuck`s Center for Supercomputing Research and Development for work on the next generation of supercomputers and Smarr`s national Center for Supercomputing Applications, to expand the availability and uses of current models.
In addition, there`s the Engineering Research Center for Compound Semiconductor Microelectronics, doing leading-edge research into the next generation of semiconductor materials.
That gives rise to speculation that ”Gallium Arsenide Prairie” would be an appropriate, if not catchy, nickname for commercial development that springs up.
So, according to Who`s Who in Technology, the university is home to the second largest collection of scientists and engineers in the nation. Only American Telephone & Telegraph employs more.
”Five years ago, everybody working here was depressed and looking for ways to leave. Now I can`t keep up with the letters from people who want to come to work at the lab,” said Greg Stillman, director of the
microelectronics laboratory.
Clearly, the Champaign-Urbana area has become techie heaven. But whether the excitement can be transferred into the cold hard cash of industrial and commercial development remains to be seen.
To many, the dreams of state and university officials are not so strange; what is unusual is that the U. of I. didn`t spin off high-tech start-ups the way Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did years ago.
”When you look at our tradition as one of the top three engineering colleges, we`re way undercompanied and we seem to be the one glaring exception to the rule that top schools attract business centers,” said Kuck.
Kuck, however, is the exception to that exception. His KAI (Kuck & Associates Inc.), the company he founded in 1979 to develop supercomputer software, has doubled its work force to 16 in the last nine months.
Kuck hinted that he has been talking to several large companies and the university about another venture that would concentrate on software applications for the supercomputer, but he is not ready to make an
announcement.
The reasons Urbana didn`t develop the way San Jose and Cambridge did vary from ”the lack of a great man” theory to the area`s unexciting geography and climate. But some focus on the university.
”At one time, the university had rather restrictive policies when it came to patents and licensing. Companies felt we were impossible to deal with. We`ve had to change all that to meet the demands of today`s top faculty,”
said Sarah Wasserman, assistant vice chancellor for research.
”There has been an evolution in intellectual property policies, and we feel the word is getting out that we are not intractable. Now the university is even willing to to work with students and faculty to help them through the process of getting a patent.”
Though Kuck grouses that sometimes the university`s ”implementation doesn`t match its theories,” he said the attitude, especially in the engineering school, toward commercial development has improved dramatically in recent years.
”The university and state still have a long way to come in coordinating efforts in regard to recruiting companies and providing incentives for graduate students to stick around. But the university is more open-minded, and government is interested,” he said.
”For the first time, we`re seeing local mayors, chambers of commerce and the university all sitting around talking about it.”
The state worked closely with the university and EDI Inc., a start-up company formed by electrical and computer engineering Professor Bill Hunsinger, to start a training program in microelectronics fabrication at nearby Parkland College. One of the area`s shortcomings traditionally has been its lack of technical laborers.
”We`re handicapped by our image of being in the prairie, but I think the time is right to see a lot of ideas developed here transferred into spinoffs and start-up companies,” said Stillman. ”We could see a lot of semiconductor manufacturing companies locating here if our ideas pay off in four or five years.
”If a new supercomputer is developed around an integrated circuit that comes out of our gallium arsenide research, it`s hard to see where the growth would stop,” Stillman added.
”In fact, a lot of people are betting their careers on it.”
Smarr`s applications center is designed to attract corporate interest in the area and corporate dollars to the university. Under the National Science Foundation`s grant to set up the center, one of four in the nation, 10 percent of the computer time on the Cray can be sold to industrial ”partners.”
The Eastman Kodak Co. recently signed on for the first of these partnerships. In return for $3 million in the next three years, Kodak scientists will have offices in the supercomputer applications building and access to the supercomputer and its experts.
Smarr is aiming for nine more such partnerships. Thirty-one corporations have visited the center and more are scheduled, said John Stevenson, corporate relations officer with the University of Illinois Foundation. Smarr added that several of those corporations are on the verge of signing partnership agreements, and ”none of them have turned us down.”
Smarr sees the synergy of all the centers growing up at the university now–his, Kuck`s, the microelectronics lab and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology–as magnets for drawing large corporate research offices to the area.
”The supercomputer centers are instrumental in getting the major corporations down here, but in each case, the corporate representatives coming here are finding there are many opportunities for collaboration and mutual benefit with university programs across the board,” Smarr said.
”Once they`re here, they are finding many ways in which to interact. I think it`s inevitable that we will be seeing major research offices opening up in the Champaign-Urbana area.”
Smarr also recognizes the area`s potential for start-up companies, but he said those kind of developments are several years down the road and more related to other work going on, such as Kuck`s research.
”We see our most important role in the applications lab as bringing corporate America to Champaign-Urbana,” Smarr said. He added that he sees a lot of the important infrastructures necessary to supporting a high-tech growth area beginning to develop in the community.
”There are joint planning committees looking at issues related to such growth; the decision to expand the airport is an important outcome. It`s critical that these kind of things be happening now, and they are,” he said. ”There are the same fundamentals here that there were in other high-tech centers. People are coming together to be a part of this,” said Stevenson.
”The closer they stay, the better off they feel they are; it gives them a competitive edge.”
Stevenson also pointed to the presence on campus of representatives from such companies as International Business Machines Corp. studying the technology.
”IBM, Apple, Sun, Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corp. have all donated equipment to be used in gaining access to the supercomputer. They`re all researching new interface products,” he said.
”Obviously, major corporations are not going to move their national headquarters to Champaign,” said Norm Peterson, director of the Governor`s Commission on Science and Technology.
”But all of the out-of-state dollars, scientists and ideas coming in to be partners in the supercomputer applications center will create the right atmosphere for business growth in the area,” he said.
Peterson pointed to the state`s Technology Commercialization Centers, designed to link research talent and the business community. He described them as ”windows in and out” of the university to enhance the transfer of technology into the marketplace.
The overall growth of supercomputing promises to be astronomical in the next few years, as the world is flooded with more and more of the huge number crunchers, computers that can make a minimum of 20 million calculations per second.
Cray Research Inc., which fabricated the U. of I. unit, is not alone in producing the devices. Honeywell Inc., another maker, said last week that it is joining with Japan`s NEC Corp. in an effort to capture the market. Honeywell indicated that within days it will turn the market over to the Japanese in a corporate restructuring.
According to a study last year of the supercomputer industry by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., the number of supercomputers is expected to grow to 1,675 by the end of 1990 from 250 at the end of this year.
”The supercomputer centers have brought things that were floating in the air down to earth, like the possibility of a research development park in the area,” said Phillip D. Phillips, director of corporate relations and community development for the university. He said such plans are happening and the university is studying the feasibility of such a development, what role it should play and how much it should get involved now.
”Things are starting to occur, but it`s still in its embryonic stages,” Peterson said. ”Some studies show that it took 10 years for the companies started up along Route 128 to reach the 100-employee level. Silicon Valley and Route 128 have a 30 or 40 year jump on us, but we`re trying to accelerate the process.”
