79R9895 MMS-D

By:  Zedler                                                       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.