Louisiana to give schools, businesses access to SGI technology

Enterprise Networks & Servers, May 2005

When it opens in February, the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) will transform what people have come to expect from communities working to attract high-tech businesses. Not content to rely on the usual tax breaks and highway interchanges to draw new technology and research and development jobs, the State of Louisiana, the Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA) and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have united to provide something that can make companies more agile, competitive and innovative.

LITE will be packed with leading-edge solutions from Silicon Graphics, whose compute, storage and visualization systems will provide LITE users with multiple immersive environments capable of engaging workgroups of one to hundreds of participants. The concentration of supercomputer-class servers, interactive 3D theaters, blistering visualization systems, massive data storage and high-speed networking will give Louisiana businesses and research universities a chance to use technologies that have traditionally been available only to the world's energy leaders, pharmaceutical giants, aerospace firms, government agencies and science museums.

LITE involves partnerships between government, universities, and industry for basic research, application development, testing and validation, product development, and commercial production, along with delivery of visualization technologies and high-performance computer modeling.

Previously known as the Acadiana Technology Immersion Center (ATIC), LITE is an economic development enterprise that will serve clients in the government, university and industry sectors, with worldwide access provided via the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI). Corporations or research organizations that partner with Louisiana-based businesses and universities will be provided access at an incentive rate. Businesses that locate technology resources - such as people, programs, facilities and equipment - in Louisiana will receive additional considerations and incentives.

"Businesses and research organizations today need the very best resources to win in the global economy," said Gregg Gothreaux, LEDA president. "With LITE, Lafayette is providing access to the world's most comprehensive immersive technologies available for businesses of all sizes, in addition to university researchers from Louisiana and beyond. Powered by SGI, LITE will help us develop the local resources in talent and expertise that abound in the Lafayette area, and cultivate this region and Louisiana as a center for innovation in energy research, manufacturing, aerospace, environmental, entertainment and other technology-rich industries."

Located on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the $20 million, 70,000-square-foot LITE complex will be co-named the SGI Center for Innovative Research and Advanced Visualization. It will feature one of the most comprehensive and tightly integrated installations of SGI technology ever assembled.

LITE administrators plan to deploy the SGI resources as a visualization and computational GRID that will be available to users on a large scale via LITE's 60GB connection to the Louisiana Optical Network and the National Lamba Rail. As such, the facility will become an important resource to researchers throughout North America and the world.

Funded by the State of Louisiana, the LITE facility will create an environment designed to stimulate collaboration between technology-intensive companies, ventures and entrepreneurs, researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and other state and national universities, as well as federal government agencies. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette will occupy 5,000 square feet of the new facility, with plans to enhance its long-established advanced computing research efforts.

Lafayette's LITE reaches businesses where they live by contributing to their ability to more efficiently produce better products and services for a marketplace where change is accelerating. "With LITE, even small companies can base their R&D or collaboration efforts on the same fundamental technologies that helped put rovers on Mars, new passenger jets in the skies, life-saving drugs in the hands of patients, and new sources of energy throughout the world," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, chief technology officer at SGI. "SGI is proud to help welcome this new era in the nurturing of innovation."