Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the Lafayette Economic Development Authority proudly held the grand opening for the Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise, or LITE, last Wednesday.

The facility, recognizable due to the large egg-like structure at its entrance, is located on Cajundome Blvd. across from Cajun Field.

“It’s an exciting day for Lafayette, and it’s an exciting day for Louisiana,” said Blanco, in an address inside the facility following the ceremonial ribbon cutting. “When Neil Armstrong took that first step on the moon, he called it ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Ladies and gentlemen, today is one giant leap for Lafayette, and one giant leap for Louisiana.”

“This is indeed a great day,” said Jerry Luke LeBlanc, Louisiana’s commissioner of administration and a Lafayette native, “not only for Louisiana, but for Acadiana, this region and Lafayette. [It is] the culmination of a lot of hard work, dedication and belief in a dream.”

“Gov. Kathleen Blanco has made education and economic equal partners in her plans for this state’s recovery and renaissance,” said Ray Authement, Ph.D., and president of UL Lafayette. “We applaud her for taking the common sense approach and encourage her to stay the course. We’re here because she had the vision, courage and foresight to invest $40 million in LITE.”

“The state knows what’s happening at the regional level and at the national level, said Carolina Cruz-Neira, executive director and chief scientist at LITE. “The state knows what we need to be competitive as a state and as a city in the regional and national arena. They are trying to do something that helps people, that improves the quality of life.”

The facility, in planning and construction stages for the past six years, is one of the most advanced supercomputing and visualization centers in the world.

“Dr. Carolina Cruz tells me that there are only four states in this country that have similar investments,” said Blanco excitedly, “and when I say similar, she clarifies that California, Illinois, Indiana and Virginia perhaps have either supercomputing capacity or imaging capacity, but none have both. No state has as much invested in one place as this one facility here in Lafayette, La. [...] Only Germany and Japan are competing at this level — this is how powerful this combined investment positions Louisiana in the global economy in technology.”

“I was in Germany for a similar supercomputing opening,” said Dennis McKenna, CEO of Silicon Graphics, Inc., the company which provided the supercomputers that power the LITE facility, “and this was a supercomputing center funded by the German government, and I must say, being here today, you have something that is state of the art in the state of Louisiana that compares to what the country of Germany has committed to. The potential of this computing center; this visualization center is equivalent to anything I’ve seen in the world today.”

LeBlanc said that “a facility like LITE, where you can have unlimited opportunities, unlimited ability to draw business not only from other parts of the country but from around the world, will provide future stability for our state and for our region.”

“Imagine you are an engineer, and you are designing a building like [the LITE building],” said Cruz-Neira. “You want to be air efficient. You want to have a good temperature. You want to have all the rooms evenly cool, evenly warm up. We would be able to simulate it, and change the configuration of the rooms and the fans, and then an engineer would be able to see whether or not his design is efficient. He’s going to be able to do that on the fly, because we not only see, we compute.”

“I believe that this is a turning point in our economic development history for this state,” said Blanco. “The LITE center swings its doors wide open to the next century. This is our future. Make yourselves at home, because we are here to stay. This region is now competitive in ways that we could not even imagine as short a time as five or 10 years ago.”

The LITE facility is not the only new technology being introduced this fall.

“On Oct. 31, just a few weeks away,” said Authement, “we’ll gather again to install, or to light, the Louisiana Optical Network that gives us connectivity with all of the research universities in the state, and to the LambdaRail (a high-speed fiber-optic network), to give us access to all the research at universities from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean.”

Blanco said these two projects would work together to provide an unparalleled opportunity for Louisiana.

“The first major technology investment that I directed after I became governor came in September of 2004, when I announced the state would invest $40 million in a network called LONI, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative,” said Blanco. “LONI is the network that interconnects all our research universities and then moves them out on to the LambdaRail to connect to all the computers in the world. This powerful network, when combined with this LITE system, positions us in such a way that all of our scientists can collaborate.”

“The way science and engineering is done is going to change,” said Bradd Clark, Ph.D., the dean of sciences at UL Lafayette. “We are bringing a facility that will speed up the rapid change in science and engineering for the betterment of all mankind. I’m excited about this.”

“Those two investments put together position Louisiana in the most incredibly powerful way in the world of technology, which is the world of our future,” said Blanco. “It is our economic future.”

Blanco defended her decision to continue with the project after the budget problems caused by hurricanes last fall.

“There were many false prophets of doom who didn’t want the state to continue its investment in this LITE project after [Hurricane] Katrina,” said Blanco. “I knew it was risky, but didn’t let that stop us. We owe it to ourselves to become a leader in technology. We owe it to ourselves to be flexible enough to attract new opportunities for investors, and we owe it to ourselves not to let our darkest hours shut down our brightest opportunities. ”

“This is a really exciting time for the university,” said H. Gordon Brooks II, dean of the College of the Arts at UL Lafayette. “This LITE facility will give us unprecedented access to the most cutting edge visualization technology available.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Clark excitedly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 9:41 am and is filed under news, vermilion.