H.R. No. 941


R E S O L U T I O N
WHEREAS, The University of Texas at Arlington has been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a supercomputer cluster that will connect with the new international atomic supercollider in Geneva, Switzerland; and WHEREAS, Known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this supercollider is presently under construction at CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world; with seven times more power than the current facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, the new supercollider is expected to become operational in 2007-2008; it is hoped that research made possible by the LHC will help to answer such fundamental questions of physics as those concerning the properties of matter and the origin of mass; and WHEREAS, Experiments conducted with the supercollider will involve 2,000 physicists and require an enormous amount of computing power; to address the need for such a tremendous capacity, an international grid composed of tiers of computing centers is being developed; and WHEREAS, In the United States, the Fermi and Brookhaven national laboratories were designated as tier-one centers in 2001; they are being joined now by three tier-two centers: UT-Arlington, Boston University-Harvard University, and the University of Chicago-Indiana University; and WHEREAS, A team of UT-Arlington scientists, led by the noted physicist Dr. Kaushik De, designed the university's winning proposal, which was judged superior to plans offered by such eminent competing institutions as the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, and the University of Michigan; a Southwest consortium, consisting of the University of Oklahoma, Langston University, and the University of New Mexico, will work with UT-Arlington on building its networks; and WHEREAS, Extending over five years, the NSF grant to UT-Arlington is designed to cover the initial cost of acquiring computers; when the new computing grid is joined to the supercollider, it will mark the next important step in the evolution of the Internet and World Wide Web computing; and WHEREAS, Even before UT-Arlington was selected as one of the new computing centers, the school had been involved in the work at CERN through its help with the construction of a giant microscope known as ATLAS; housed underground adjacent to the supercollider, ATLAS stands eight stories tall and boasts a footprint the size of a football field; portions of the microscope were built at UT-Arlington, which shipped 135 half-ton boxes of ATLAS parts to Geneva; and WHEREAS, Through its participation in the creation of an international computer grid to support research conducted with the new supercollider, UT-Arlington is adding to the luster of this state and making a vital contribution to the advancement of human knowledge; now, therefore, be it RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives of the 79th Texas Legislature hereby congratulate The University of Texas at Arlington on its receipt of a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation and on its designation as a supercollider network computing site and extend to all those associated with this project sincere best wishes for continued success. Zedler ______________________________ Speaker of the House I certify that H.R. No. 941 was adopted by the House on April 14, 2005, by a non-record vote. ______________________________ Chief Clerk of the House