The South Stadium office building will be renovated for an 18,000-square-foot computer science center, largely funded by a donation from the children of two University of Nebraska-Lincoln alumni.
University of Nebraska Foundation directors knew about the donation from Paul "Chip" Schorr and Melissa Condo for some time before it was presented in the name of their parents, June and Paul Schorr III, at Memorial Stadium during Saturday's football game.
June and Paul Schorr III, however, were nearly taken by surprise.
"I know they wanted to keep it quiet right up to the very game," said Dorothy Endacott of the NU Foundation. "The two of them wanted to do this to surprise their parents."
For the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the new $3 million building - near the department's offices in Avery Hall - was not such a shocker.
"Details have kind of slowly been coming," said David Swanson, the director of the Research Computing Facility at UNL.
Swanson said moving from rental space in the former Miller and Paine Building at 13th and O streets to the old offices of NU Football Coach Bill Callahan and his staff members will take quite a bit of time and organization.
The Athletic Department offices, which have filled the building since its construction in 1972, will be moved to the Tom and Nancy Osborne Complex, making room for the hundreds of computers that will buzz over the heads of football players in the stadium's visitor locker rooms.
PrairieFire, the state's most powerful supercomputer, will also be moved to the new facility followed by Red, another cluster computer owned and operated by the university.
"The challenge is to make it as painless as possible for the people that are using PrairieFire," Swanson said. "(UNL administrators) want us out of Miller and Paine so they can stop paying rent on it … we always knew it was a temporary space."
The move will provide a more expansive environment for both supercomputers, especially PrairieFire, which has grown to its full capacity at its current location because of limitations on cooling the device.
That means moving the supercomputer is a priority for Swanson and his coworkers, who want to see it and its network become as fast a possible.
In the Miller and Paine Building, only one network wire connected the entire computer facility to the university network. In the South Stadium building, the department will use a number of cables to directly connect to the network.
That could make the computers work up to 10 times faster, Swanson said.
The university also has $1 million budgeted for new hardware, including more computers and supercomputer additions.
The computer science and engineering department is located in three buildings on and off campus, including the former Miller and Paine Building.
Renovations for the new, consolidated home of the department will begin in January and should be complete by November 2007.
