Skip to content
TLS T.L. Swetnam

A Data Center on Route 66

In the 1950s if you were driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, Albuquerque was a good place to stop and service your car. In between the long, empty runs of desert in either direction lay 2,400 miles of two-lane asphalt. Along this stretch of US Route 66 (Central Ave) was a corridor of gas stations, tire shops, and garages. One of them was the Galles Motor Company, a family-owned Cadillac and Oldsmobile dealership.

Local architect William Burk, Jr. had created a sunlit showroom of glass and flagstone, the Cadillac and Oldsmobile badges cut in low relief — a space full of automobiles and the future it promised. That showroom was only the bright tip of something much larger: seventy-three thousand square feet of building, most of it mechanics' bays for servicing those cars on their way East or West. Then as now, car dealerships make the flashiest sales on the showroom floor and their steady money in the service lane. The cars in the window sold the dream; the grease and tires paid the bills.

Walk in through the same doors today and you find a warren of early 2000s cubicles, worn by decades of use. The showroom windows are covered and bent venetian blinds shade the workspace from the hot New Mexico sun. The service bays are gone — replaced by artists' recording studios, 3D printers, and racks of noisy supercomputers and blasting air conditioners. The hand-painted map of New Mexico, a beautiful holdover from the dealership, still hangs on the western wall. The Galles family had sold this city its first automobile back in 1908; the building they left behind now sells something else entirely. This is the home of the University of New Mexico's Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) and on July 1st I have the honor of becoming its latest director.

A home for Art, Science, and Engineering

UNM has been building its supercomputers in an old car dealership for thirty-plus years. The Center started life in 1994 as the Albuquerque Resource Center, then the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, and finally took its present name in 2009. The machines have cycled in and out, just like the cars did; but the address has not.

There is something beautiful about how the space evolved, but its not the architecture, its the people who fill it. When the center renovated in the mid-2000s, it didn't wall the engineers off from everyone else — it made room for the ARTS Lab (Art, Research, Technology, and Science), and in 2011 it opened the CARC Gallery, where student, faculty, and alumni work hangs a few steps from the machine room. Computation and culture live together under one mid-century roof. For a field that loves to talk about interdisciplinarity and rarely puts a printmaker down the hall from a compute cluster, that arrangement is quietly radical, and I intend to protect it.

It also raises the stakes. UNM is the flagship public university of a majority-minority state and a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). The researchers and students who walk past the old Galles road map are not, by and large, the people advanced computing was built to serve. Which brings me to the road outside.

The Mother Road

Route 66 was not built to service the wealthy. John Steinbeck called it the people's highway "the Mother Road" — the one that stitched together small towns from Chicago to Santa Monica and gave ordinary Americans a way to move, to work, to leave and to arrive. Its romance was access. You did not need a private rail car or an airline ticket; all you needed was a full tank of gas and somewhere to go.

I think the Mother Road is a fitting metaphor for what a university research-computing center should be. CARC sits on the literal Mother Road, and I want it to become New Mexico's on-ramp to advanced computing and artificial intelligence — the place a first-generation student, a tribal college, a rural lab, or a brand-new faculty member can pull onto the same infrastructure as anyone at Caltech or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Three lanes for the road ahead:

  • Open-access data storage. Research runs on data, and too much of it lives behind paywalls or in formats nobody can open without a license. I want CARC to offer a public commons for research data — open, FAIR, and durable — so that what New Mexico's researchers produce stays usable by New Mexico.
  • AI inference services. The cost of frontier AI is quickly becoming a new digital divide. CARC can flatten this by running inference as a shared utility — the models, the GPUs, the endpoints — so that a graduate student with a good idea doesn't need a startup's budget to test it.
  • Continued HPC and cloud innovation. The big iron computer racks in those old service bays still matters as does the Cloud. My job is to keep both current and to build the bridges between them, so researchers can reach for whichever fits the problem without having to become systems administrators to do it.

None of this is novel for its own sake. It is the same promise a highway makes: lower the cost of entry, and more people get to travel.

The road ahead

The Galles showroom sold a vision of mobility — the open road, the full tank, the country shrinking to the size of a windshield. The building has outlived that promise, taken up another, and will transition again in the future. The vehicles have changed; the highway has not. Advanced quantum computing and artificial intelligence are driving how scientific discovery moves now, and a great many people are standing at the on-ramp without a way on.

I'm coming to The University of New Mexico to help lead on this. It seems fitting that the work starts in an old glass-walled showroom built to celebrate the open road. More to come from Route 66.