Wyoming Broadband Summit: New generation of Microsoft data centers to be tested in Cheyenne

Microsoft's Gregg McKnight was in Cheyenne today talking about a pilot project for a new kind of data center. He was a speaker at the first Wyoming Broadband Summit at Little America.

Asked McKnight: “Who would have expected Cheyenne to be the place where the next generation of data centers would arise?”

Not me. Maybe not you, or your neighbors. And possibly not McKnight, not until he visited Cheyenne a few months ago.

He was greeted warmly by officials from the University of Wyoming, Cheyenne LEADS, Board of Public Utilities and other members of the community.

“This was a dream” he said, adding that, over the course of several days, he discovered that Cheyenne “was the ideal location to do business.”

Microsoft wants to build a $7.6 million data center that will run off of methane produced by the city’s Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility. To that end, the city of Cheyenne will apply for $1.5 million from the Wyoming Business Council's Council’s Business Ready Community Grant and Loan Program. Three weeks ago, the Cheyenne City Council’s Finance Committee gave its approval to move the request forward. If approved, the grant would cover up to $1.5 million of the project’s total cost, with Microsoft providing the balance.

According to officials at the computing giant, the project would consist of the data plant, which would be connected to a fuel cell. Both would be in close proximity to the water reclamation facility, which is located on Campstool Road just south of Interstate 80.

The fuel cell would collect excess methane gas from the water reclamation facility’s biodigester and would then convert the gas into about 300 kilowatts of electricity. The data center itself would require only 200 kilowatts to run. Not sure where the remaining 100 Kw would do. Presumably it could be used for other energy needs in Cheyenne.

The plant will test Microsoft's new “siliconization” process, which utilizes silicon to move beyond the era of the microprocessor. McKnight gave a quick explanation which went way over my head. He showed a slide that illustrated this formula: “Si Systems + Fuel Cells + Modularity=Reimagine the Data Center.” Sounds cool to me. Faster technology is needed for the 200-plus cloud services Microsoft now provides. “There will be a twelve-fold increase in the amount of info that flows through the optic fiber backbone in the next five years,” McKnight said. He called the Cheyenne experiment the next step in “the evolving data center.”

The fuel cell data plant is separate from a $112 million cloud data center Microsoft has proposed to build to the west of Cheyenne, near the recently-opened National Center for Atmospheric Research supercomputing facility.

McKnight is quite happy with Cheyenne. And why wouldn't he be? The state of Wyoming has pledged $10.7 million in grants and incentives for the cloud data center project. Microsoft is making an initial $78-million investment and plans to go up to $112 million, according to Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, who also spoke at Tuesday's summit. He's a big believer in data centers. And I'm beginning to believe that he's on the right track. All of this will change Cheyenne for the better. New technology. New ideas. New people moving in. New energy mixes with old energy. Not sure what the formula is for that, but it could be a heady mix.

Researchers/authors Peter and Rosemary Grant speak about the "Evolution of Darwin's Finches" at UW

This will drive the fundies crazy (from a UW press release):

Two of the world’s leading evolutionary researchers, Peter and Rosemary Grant, will speak at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, in the University of Wyoming Berry Center auditorium.

They will discuss “Evolution of Darwin’s Finches.” UW Zoology Professor Craig Benkman will host their presentation as part of the L. Floyd Clarke Memorial Lecture Series.

The Grants’ research on evolution in the Galapagos Islands, where they have spent six months of every year since 1973, is well-known. Capturing, tagging and taking blood samples of the finches on the island of Daphne Major, the two Princeton University emeritus professors continue the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin in the place that inspired his theory of evolution.

"The Grants' three-year study of the evolution of Galapagos Island finches and their adaptive responses to environmental change is one of the classic studies in biology,” says Scott Seville, zoologist and UW Outreach School associate dean. “Their work has been featured in many documentaries and was the focus of the Pulitzer prize-winning book ‘Beak of the Finch’ by Jonathan Wiener."

In 2008, the Grants were among 13 recipients of the prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal, which is bestowed every 50 years by the Linnean Society of London. They received the Kyoto Prize in basic sciences, an international award honoring significant contributions to scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. They have written numerous articles and books on their discoveries.

For more information, call (307) 766-5627.

Wyoming Hell Pig rampages through book festival

The "Hell Pig" (a.k.a. Archaeotherium) display at the Tate Geological Museum at Casper College. I was attending "A Conversation about Dinosaurs" at the Tate as part of the Equality State Book Festival. Dino illustrator Ray Troll was one of the speakers. His colorful "Hell Pig" illustration adorns Tate T-shirts.

More on Hell Pig from an October 2009 Casper College press release:

Kent Sundell, Casper College geology instructor, appeared on a new National Geographic TV series: "Prehistoric Predators." The segment in which Sundell appeared was entitled: "Killer Pigs."

"At four feet wide and 1,000 pounds, the killer pig was a prehistoric battle tank that dominated the North American landscape. Endowed with some truly unique bioengineering traits, the killer pig relied on its massive three-foot-long skull and binocular vision to catch its prey," said the National Geographic Society on its website: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/prehistoric-predators/3885/Overview.

The National Geographic crew filmed Sundell in the field at Douglas, Wyo. and at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center for three days in June of 2008. Sundell has proven that the local prehistoric pig specimens from Wyoming, scientific name Archaeotherium, are “definitely predatory in nature.”

Ridin' and ropin' those docile dinos

This photo by John Scalzi is great in so many ways. It's from Kentucky's Creation Museum, and shows a boy riding a statue of a baby Triceratops, which is Wyoming's official state dinosaur. The kid is having fun, and probably doesn't care a wit that Triceratops were never used as rodeo stock. Since it's rodeo season in the West, you can ask just about any cowboy -- horses and bulls are preferable to dinos. It's a fine idea, though, and one which should be considered if we ever get our hands on that dino DNA that was used so disastrously in "Jurassic Park." I think it would be much more fun to ride bareback on a Velociraptor, with others playfully nipping at your boot heels. But that's just me.

The Creation Museum contends that humans and dinos lived side-by-side. It also contends that the T-Rex was a vegeterian. Not sure what those big pointy teeth were used for. Maybe plants were tougher 6,000 years ago.

In Wyoming, we know our dinosaurs and our evolutionary history. That what makes the closing of the University of Wyoming's Geological Museum so sad. In a time of Creation Museums, we desperately need as much real science as possible. So budget cuts are made and the thing that UW decides is expendable is a museum devoted to the reality-based world. The move has been controversial. I heard news yesterday that private funding has been raised to keep the museum in business. Let's hope so.

More dinosaur bones have been dug out of Wyoming that almost anywhere else in the world. Plant and animal life from millions of years ago make up our massive oil and coal reserves. We boast an official state dinosaur and an official state fossil, the Knightia. I think we're the only state that puts so much stock in the ancient world, one that goes back way farther than 6,000 years.

I have a story called "The History of Surfing in Wyoming" that posits a post-global warming Wyoming (Wyoming Islands) where the surf is bitchen on the beaches of the Big Horns and Wind Rivers (formerly mountain ranges) and aqua-rodeo cowboys get their kicks riding sea creatures resurrected from the floor of the ancient inland sea. Reality-based scenarios are fun when it comes to science. But they don't hold a candle to the worlds conjured by the imagination.

I leave you with the Wyoming Islands version of the Beach Boys' Surfin' U.S.A. (feel free to sing along):

If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody'd be surfin'
Like Wyoming-yay
You'd see 'em wearing cut-off Ryders
Stetsons and (boots) too
A buzz-cut surfers’ hairdo
Surfin' U.S.A.

You'd catch 'em surfin' at Happy Jack
Casper Island Beach
Flaming Gorge and Lander
and the Big Horn Islands
All over South Pass
And down Encampment way
Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

We'll all be planning that route
We're gonna take real soon
We're waxing down our surfboards
We can't wait for June
We'll all be gone for the summer
We're on surfari to stay
Tell the teacher we're surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

Rock River and Sundance
and Laramie Peak
Meeteetse and Midwest,
Big Surf Reef near Ten Sleep
All over the Wind Rivers
and Uinta Bay
Everybody's gone surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A.

Praise the Darwin -- and put up a billboard

Darwin even looks a little God-like (in the Old Testament sense) on this billboard erected outside Grand Junction, Colo. Grand Junction was chosen, along with sites in Dayton, Tenn., and Dover, Pa., due to some anti-evolutionary nonsense perpetrated by these communities.

The Tennessee and Pennsylvania towns had landmark court cases about the teaching of evolution. In Grand Junction, the Freedom from Religion Foundation has complained to the Mesa County commissioners about denominational prayers in public meetings.

The foundation is made up of agnostics and atheists who fight government displays of religion.

I tend toward agnostic. I'd like to see one of these billboards in Wyoming, although don't want to suffer through any fundie creationist hoo-ha to get one.